Corybantes
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Harry investigates a mysterious death at Draco's magic club, Corybantes. Someone has to be lying for the man to have died as he did- and Harry is afraid it's Draco. COMPLETE.
1. Fantasy and Reality

**Title: **Corybantes

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Violence, OC character death, profanity, sex, mentions of random fetishes and suicide. Ignores the DH epilogue.

**Summary: **A mysterious death has occurred at Draco Malfoy's club, Corybantes, which specializes in using magic to make its clients' deepest fantasies come true. As Auror Harry Potter investigates, he finds himself admiring Malfoy's courage and determination in achieving success. Which could be a problem, as there's a fairly large chance that Malfoy is the murderer.

**Author's Notes: **Corybantes were servants of the goddess Cybele who worked themselves up into ecstatic trances with drumming and dancing. Though applying to a different kind of ecstasy, it seemed a fairly good name for Draco's club. This story will be about ten or twelve chapters long.

**Corybantes**

_Chapter One—Fantasy and Reality_

It didn't look like much, viewed from the outside.

Harry considered it with his arms folded in front of him, the hand that held his wand resting along his right forearm. A few of the people passing into the club cocked their heads at him and gaped. Harry didn't know whether it was his posture, his heavy dark cloak, or the fact that he lingered outside without going in that made them look at him like that. He hardly cared. In the circus that was the corner of Knockturn Alley and Roof Alley, one black-clad stranger was hardly going to stand out.

Lights blazed past him, wandering winged peddlers calling out hoarsely that they had captured fairies for sale. Women whom shifting shadows hid stood in the entrance of small shops, variously advertising phoenix eggs, the latest in completely loyal familiars, or delightful and unexpected perversions to be found with house-elves. The shop two doors down from the building Harry examined disdained all subtlety, flaunting an enormous ruby whip on the door and an image of a man twisting in pain under it, bleeding turquoise blood.

Harry reckoned that helped attract the kind of clientele they wanted, or they wouldn't have used it. For him, it was hard to imagine anything less attractive.

The building across from him was tame in comparison. Three floors—and an unknown amount of space underground, according to the privileged information Harry had received—it squatted as if ashamed of its height. The stone making it up was grey marble, with smoky veins that wouldn't become apparent until the observer was close. The door was a modest little arch, decorated around the edge with a thin strip of yellow. Harry knew it was real gold, but he doubted most of the people swirling past him in the streets did.

_Malfoy hasn't done too badly for himself since the war._

Of course, whether he had done badly by others was the important question.

Harry shook himself and pulled away from the façade of the shop he'd leaned against. Fifteen minutes of observation of a strange place was enough—more than he usually did, in fact, but he'd felt compelled to do it both because of the kind of place it was and because of who owned it.

Now he thought he had the measure of the club, if not the owner, and could enter with some confidence.

*

Whatever plainness Malfoy had felt compelled to put on the front of the building, he hadn't restricted himself when it came to the interior. Harry, adopting the bored mask he generally used when he wanted to keep from gaping, supposed that it could still be called good taste.

_Uninhibited, lustful, unrestrained—_

Yeah, those were appropriate words, too.

The place was dark inside, due to carefully maintained illusions and glittering nets full of anti-light, the one of the Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes that had grown from a trick into a serious tool for use everywhere. The dark clusters of captured midnight, or at least George claimed that was how he made it, threw shadows like torches threw beams. But they hung from clips near the top of the club, allowing more than enough light to fall on the murals that decorated the lower walls.

Next to Harry, shaggy lions with black manes drew a chariot in which a woman with a curving neck like a swan's perched, her arms folded in front of her, vines wreathing her temples, corn springing up under the wheels of the chariot. The lightest of reins ran from her hand to the lions' mouths. It was only when looking down at the lions' legs that Harry noticed leaves as thick as chains confining their every step. Or were the leaves springing up where they touched, like the corn from the chariot's wheels? Harry shook his head. He wasn't an art expert; he wouldn't want to guess a painter's intentions from his imperfect observations.

On the opposite wall he saw a tribe of dancers in various stages of shedding their clothes, whirling around each other. There were men and women, and people who looked halfway in the transformation between men and women, as if they'd taken the Iphis Potion. There were couples melded together, with four arms and four legs, two mouths, and four eyes. There were people with the legs of goats, the heads of wolves, the arms of monkeys. Harry had to admit it was a good picture. The level of skill wasn't what made his lip curl. It was what the picture symbolized: wildness, fantasy, magic used to make anything and everything happen.

It might be nice to dream about, but he'd seen the results of plenty of wizards and witches using magic to do anything they pleased in his work as an Auror. They never took the pleasure of their victims into account.

He turned and looked up. Yes, as he had been promised, the name of the club hung suspended above his head, in the middle of half-lit darkness, so that Harry honestly wasn't sure if it was an illusion itself, or suspended by spells, or supported from the floor.

_Corybantes_.

At least the name was in keeping with the pictures.

When he lowered his head, he realized that he had attracted attention already. This central room of the club was deliberately quiet and peaceful, filled with chairs where customers could sit comfortably and couches where they could recline. Harry heard the splash of water from distant corners, the gurgle of liquid being poured, the sound of what were probably intelligent and witty words in conversation. None of it could relax him. He understood the message of the murals and the name too well.

But here came a witch wrapped in shadows not unlike the witches who had called their wares outside, her smile pure seduction. Her eyes were a brighter blue than any that Harry had seen, and he realized with an unpleasant shock when she was near that they were sapphires sewn into her skin. She halted in front of him and held out her hand. It was white and smooth as ice on the palm, but Harry could see snake scales vanishing into the shadow of her sleeve.

"Welcome to Corybantes," she murmured. "You look as if you did not yet know your pleasure. Will you come with me and discover it?"

Harry gave her a small, hard smile. At least it made her forehead wrinkle. "I'm here on business," he said, and opened his cloak enough to show her the golden Auror pendant that the Department had started issuing five years ago, after a ring of criminals had successfully impersonated officials from Magical Law Enforcement. The pendant showed a phoenix, wings spread, clutching a wand. "Auror Harry Potter. I've come about the murder."

The woman took a step back from him, opening her mouth to display teeth too small to be human. "Auror Potter—that is—"

"Let him be, Shadow," said a familiar voice from the side. "I knew the Department would send him."

Harry barely turned his head to acknowledge Malfoy, keeping his eyes fixed on Shadow. He'd seen her dart out a flickering tongue, which wasn't a surprise in and of itself, but a small breath of flame had come with it. Spells that would give human beings the powers of dragons, centaurs, or other controlled magical creatures were definitely Dark Arts.

"Do stop startling my employees, Potter," Malfoy said, as he slid to a stop near Harry. He stood close to intimidate. Harry turned his head to look at him by slow degrees, wanting to show the man that he had next to no power over Harry.

Malfoy hadn't changed, except to grow more and more like what he'd always been. His eyes were brighter, and his hair paler, and his features so much like Lucius's that Harry could have been fooled at a distance, at least if Lucius was still alive. Harry wondered why the man hadn't used his own fantasy magic on himself to change his appearance to something perfect or more inhuman, since those two qualities had always seemed to be his ambition during Hogwarts. Then he dismissed it as none of his business. He only needed to know as much of Malfoy's psychology as was relevant to the case.

"I didn't mean to," he said. "I had assumed you would have messages warning them I was on my way." He looked about for Shadow, but she had already retreated back into the darkness. With a shrug, Harry focused on Malfoy. He wasn't here to investigate Dark Arts spells, and he already knew this wasn't a place the Ministry was anxious to hear reports on, or they would have sent numerous Aurors here instead of him, the Department's "confidential investigator." "Do you have the body available for viewing?"

Malfoy gave him a lazy smile that was the apotheosis of all the sneers he'd ever used. Perhaps he had used magic, after all, Harry thought. "Harry Potter," Malfoy breathed. "I see that face quite often."

Harry shrugged indifferently. "I imagine you do."

Malfoy stiffened. "Oh?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm told on good authority that it's a common fantasy, to fuck or be fucked by the Chosen One," he said. "And you're in the business of fulfilling fantasies, aren't you?"

Malfoy relaxed all at once, as though he'd won back money that he'd thought lost. "Yes," he said. Then he raised a curious eyebrow. "I wouldn't have expected someone as avowedly pure as yourself to know about that."

Harry sighed. It seemed that Malfoy was determined to be difficult. Harry knew he shouldn't antagonize him, since Malfoy had power over certain members of the Ministry who'd come here. But he was tired of people who wanted to "banter" with him. The essential lines never changed. They all assumed they should hold more importance in Harry's memory than they did.

"I learn more than one impure thing in this business," he said. "I should never have become an Auror if I wanted to stay innocent." He hoped that would be enough to fulfill Malfoy's quota of small talk. This place was distasteful. "Now, the body?"

"Softly, softly, Potter," Malfoy murmured. He slid a step closer. Harry rolled his eyes and slipped into something that most people would see as a slouch of irritation; the cloak he wore helped conceal the battle-readiness of the stance. "I haven't seen you, the real you, in years. I want to look at you."

"I imagine that you get hungry for reality here," Harry said. Malfoy looked startled but pleased this time, as though a rather stupid student had repeated a lesson word-perfect. "Murder should be enough of a dose, however. The body?"

Malfoy regarded him speculatively. "I could have you thrown out for being rude, you know. I have more power than you can estimate."

"And then someone noisier comes here."

For long, silent moments, they engaged in a staring contest. Harry didn't allow the tension that he felt prickling at his shoulders to mount to his face. It was mad that Malfoy should expect a renewal of their rivalry. They were both adults, and their lives no longer mattered to each other's.

_Of course, perhaps he's the kind of person who expects to matter to everyone, even the ones who have far different walks of life. In fact, I'm sure he's that kind of person._

Malfoy turned away at last, his tension showing in the stiff way that he carried his hands. "In this direction," he said, and guided Harry along the edge of the immense dark room.

Harry walked with his eyes straight ahead, apparently seeing nothing but Malfoy's back, but Auror training had taught him to use his peripheral vision, and there was nothing wrong with his other senses. The carpet beneath his boots absorbed every sound they made. The walls had spells on them that baffled and bounced sound, he concluded when they passed a corner that was full of soft laughter but contained no one. Another mural showed as they passed an angle of wall bending to the right: a group of naked women with streaming hair, tearing a man limb from limb among grape vines. Their mouths gaped open, their eyes closed, their faces blank.

Harry smiled grimly. That seemed a good representation of the kind of fantasies that Corybantes offered. Open your mouth, close your eyes, and do your best not to taste what you were swallowing.

Malfoy guided him down a corridor that opened from the dark room and which was tiled in dark gold. He pushed open a door at last and stood aside. Harry went in past him, though it meant turning his back on Malfoy. He had his wand with him, and the training to deal with whatever locking spells Malfoy might use to turn the room into a trap.

"I assume you will eventually want to see the room where he died," Malfoy said in an indifferent voice. "This is only the one we have used to store the body."

Harry concealed his annoyance at the fact that the corpse had been moved. Malfoy would probably shrug and say something about how his club had to make money if Harry protested. "Yes, I'll want to," he said, and then moved forwards and looked down at the corpse of Pascal Keatson.

He was a young man, Harry knew from the file he'd read, but he didn't look like it. His face was bloated, as though he'd drowned himself slowly. The skin along his neck sagged, and deep wrinkles scored his forehead. His eyes, deep blue, looked as blank as the eyes of the women in the mural outside. His hair was straw-blond. Harry raised his eyebrows. He looked almost as Dudley might, if he'd died at the age of twenty-six.

Harry lit his wand—the room had only dim torches with anti-light above them set into the walls—and bent to examine the state of his clothing.

"I assure you that we have not stripped him naked," Malfoy said.

"I know that," Harry said, and left Malfoy to make the sufficiently obvious assumption: that he was looking for clues.

It was perfectly clear how Keatson had died; the large slash in his throat would have been difficult to disguise under ordinary circumstances, and everyone agreed it had been murder. But Harry wanted to study the way the blood had soaked down his threadbare robes, and his hands.

He smiled as he crouched down to the side of the cushioned platform that Keatson had been laid on. Yes, he had thought there would be something strange here, and there was. Blood had crusted under the fingernails. So had a fleck of a single bright blue shred. Harry whispered a few detection spells over it, and arched an eyebrow when his third spell identified it. He had cast that particular detection spell almost on a whim, remembering the scales on Shadow's hand, but now there could be no doubt. The bright blue thing was neither cloth nor skin, but a snake-scale.

"Tell me again how he died," he said, as he Levitated the bit of scale out from under Keatson's fingernail and placed it in a glass vial without touching it.

"You know that story." Malfoy's voice carried more than a little asperity. His dislike of being made a fool of, as well as his quickness to suspect others' motives, hadn't changed either, Harry thought as he straightened.

"But I haven't heard it from you."

Malfoy paused, his eyes narrowing and the same lazy smile he had showed Harry earlier taking over his face. Harry bent over Keatson's legs and wondered what he was thinking.

"Keatson came to us often for fulfillment of his fantasies," Malfoy began. He made his voice low and sweet, sweeter than Harry had known it was capable of becoming. He frowned at Keatson's clean robes. _His voice and his smile both make no sense. He ought to know that he can't charm me out of arresting him if I find him guilty of something. _"They were ordinary, truly: women to honor him and think of him as the center of the universe. You're familiar with how the special rooms in the clubs work?" His voice changed again, becoming deeper. Harry felt a prickle of awareness along his neck and changed his target of annoyance to himself.

"Yes," he said.

"I should not have presumed you weren't." Malfoy had noticed the shortness of his answer. Harry berated himself again, and cast a detection spell that made every mark and stain on the robes glow with soft light. Nothing unusual appeared. Keatson had died indoors, as Malfoy claimed—or the person who had killed him outdoors was better with cleaning charms than most house-elves. "Keatson was one of those who needed our rooms. No real women could have given him the mindless devotion he commanded. He would come in, spend some time with our phantoms, and then leave.

"I had noticed that his fantasies had become more violent lately. He required the women to fight with him, to beat him, to scar him with knives." Malfoy's voice held everything but judgment. Harry reckoned he had seen much worse in his time. He stood back up and moved towards Keatson's head again, using a mild Wind Charm to part his hair so that he could examine the state of his scalp. "However, many people's tastes change over time. I thought nothing of it."

Malfoy paused. Harry glanced up again and saw him staring at the walls of the room as if dissatisfied. Harry snorted. _It's a little late in the day for him to start thinking that he should get into another business._

"Keatson went into a room as usual at nine-o'clock." Malfoy took up the tale again, his words more abrupt and jerky than before. "At eleven, his fantasies ended. Shadow came to fetch me when he hadn't appeared at ten minutes after the hour. The room automatically ejects clients if they overstay their welcome," he added.

"I'll want to talk to Shadow, too," Harry said.

Malfoy barely acknowledged this with a nod before he continued. "The room didn't respond when I used the spell that should have brought Keatson out. I entered and found him lying on the floor with his throat cut, just as you see him. I Levitated him here, as we had booked the use of the room for another client—"

Harry held back his outburst with great effort. _That's a stupid fucking reason to disturb a murder scene._

"But I did not touch the body." Malfoy clenched his fists and wheeled around to stare at Harry. "No one entered the room except for him. We have strong spells that prevent anyone from doing so. He brought no weapon with him. We also have spells that would have detected that. We are in the business of fulfilling many fantasies, but those that include violence are conducted entirely by phantoms and not by people of flesh and blood."

Harry tilted his head back and let Malfoy see the doubt in his eyes. "And all your clients are satisfied by that?"

Malfoy gave him a cold smile. "Our phantasms are quite as good as the real thing. They bleed and scream in the same way, and there are no damages to be paid if they are harmed or even killed. Most of our clients prefer it, in fact. It gives them the scope to do things that they could never do in their daily lives or with paid whores."

Harry gave a short nod to show that he understood and Malfoy could go on, though his revulsion for the place was growing by the second.

"He died in a room that no one else could have entered," Malfoy said, "not even me."

Harry stared at him. "You do that when there's the chance that something could go wrong with the spells and trap your client in there?"

"You've heard of spell-nets?" Malfoy leaned forwards, lowering his voice again. "If something goes wrong with one part of the fantasy, everything stops at once and the wards fall. But as long as the illusion is perfect, there is no need for me to intrude."

_That's all you're selling, _Harry wanted to say. _Illusions. One touch of daylight and you're burn like the vampire you are. _

But he wasn't here to air his private opinions. Kingsley had told him in strictest confidence that Malfoy had asked for Harry himself, because he knew his discretion and wanted the odor removed from his club as soon as possible. He spoke calmly. "The solution seems simple to me. His fantasies killed him."

Malfoy shook his head. "The fantasies can't harm the clients, Potter."

Harry blinked. "That seems a poor return on the price, if they pay to be whipped and beaten and nothing touches them."

"The damage feels real," Malfoy said. "It looks and smells real. It isn't. It would also end the moment something went wrong with the spell-net. Everything from beginning to end is ghostly. We pleasure the minds of our clients more than their bodies, and that's true no matter how many orgasms they have."

"You're absolutely certain of this?" Harry demanded.

Malfoy smiled. "I can give you the pseudonyms of our clients who have the most violent fantasies. They won't mind speaking to you, not when the possible consequence is Corybantes having to be shut down. They will tell you that they have had their throats cuts, their heads bashed in, their bodies drowned and thrown from high cliffs, and yet have always awakened healthy and whole."

Harry spent some moments studying him. He had taken an entire course devoted to the detection of lies, and he could see nothing of them in Malfoy's proud chin and utterly direct stare, his still hands and his pure throat.

"I'd like to examine one of these rooms—not the one Keatson died in—and study the spell-nets, all the same," he said, turning towards the door.

Malfoy's laugh rattled like diamond shards. "Why, Potter," he said, "didn't you enjoy your close look at one?" He raised his hand and gestured around the room they stood in. "This is one of them."

Harry cast a slow, careful look about. "I don't sense the spell-nets," he said.

"They're buried. Breaking the clients' suspension of disbelief is the fatal thing to a show like ours." Malfoy stepped forwards, and his eyes were bright and hot.

"Still," he murmured, "the room should show pale phantoms of a client's desires when he steps into one. Even a casual client, even one who isn't sure what he wants yet."

Harry stood still. He couldn't say _You bastard_ and maintain his composure, but he let his face look it.

Malfoy laughed again and moved closer still. His hand twitched with suppressed desire, probably to punch Harry in the face.

"You would have seen them, too," Malfoy breathed. "Instead, _no_ phantoms emerged. You seem to have a clean and empty subconscious, Potter."

Harry released a carefully controlled breath and moved to step past Malfoy. He stopped when the bastard wrapped his hand Harry's wrist. His fingers were warmer than they should be and seemed longer than normal as well; Harry could have sworn they wrapped three times around his arm.

"Or perhaps your desires are in such confusion," Malfoy whispered, "that no single one can emerge. Those are the most interesting cases to me. It is always a delight to watch their hearts emerge into knowledge of pleasure."

Harry stared into Malfoy's face and smiled. Malfoy released him and stepped back, mouth jagged and uncertain.

"You might want to examine your spell-nets, Malfoy," Harry murmured, and ducked out of the room. "And summon Shadow so that I can speak to her, as well as show me the room Keatson died in."

The uncontrolled huff of exasperation from behind him was worth all the bollocks he'd put up with that night.


	2. Appearances and Memories

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Appearances and Memories_

The room that Keatson had died in was ordinary enough, with a couch in the middle of a sea of carpet that made Harry grimace. He didn't understand why you would _want _a carpet that felt as if you could sleep on it. Carpets and beds were separate things with separate purposes.

_Although the purposes of things are perhaps less sharply defined here than elsewhere._

He stood in the doorway and spent a few minutes looking in every direction, checking for obvious clues such as spilled blood or the lingering presence of Dark magic. There was nothing. They had cleaned the room because they needed it for other people. Of course they had. That was typical of the stupidity that Harry was coming to expect from Malfoy and his employees.

He drew his wand and whispered an incantation that should let him detect the spell-nets. It would make them gleam with white light that only Harry would be able to see.

The next moment, he was almost blinded. There were spell-nets in every direction, threading under the ridiculous carpet, through the walls, through the material of the couch, and especially concentrated in the corners where walls met ceiling.

That would make sense, Harry thought as he rubbed his jaw. Few people spent much time peering into those corners, unless they were the sort who found spiderwebs intolerable and must check for their presence in every new room.

"Lord Malfoy said that you wanted to speak with me. Auror Potter."

Harry had to swallow, hard, to keep from bursting into laughter at the silly title Malfoy made his employees call him. That wouldn't earn him Shadow's sympathy, and he needed her sympathy, or at least her cooperation, in order to make sense of what the evidence was telling him. He turned around and gave her a small smile. The sapphire eyes and small teeth and other things, when he was braced for them, weren't so surprising. "Yes. I understand that you were the one to approach the room and call for Keatson to show himself when ten minutes past his deadline had elapsed."

Shadow nodded. She seemed reluctant to come close to him, as if Harry was the one who had unknown Dark magic implanted in his body. "Yes, sir. The rooms _never _fail to work like that, so I knew something was wrong right away. But it made sense once I understood it. The rooms are designed to eject living people who overstay their welcome. They don't get rid of objects, and the corpse was just another object to it."

Harry made a soft interested noise in the back of his throat, another possibility for the murder occurring to him. "Could someone else have brought in an object and left it concealed in the room, to kill Keatson when he arrived?"

Shadow gave him a blank look, which she was good at with gems for eyes. "Everyone who enters the club is searched for weapons, sir."

"What if it was something that didn't look like a weapon?" Harry had seen plenty of things during his career as an Auror that fit that category, but had turned out to be deadly to someone all the same.

"We would still find it, sir, and ask that person what he was doing with it." Shadow looked disapproving.

"I'd like a list of the people who used this room before Keatson." Harry turned around to pace through the room, suffering only a slight qualm about turning his back on Shadow. He would have been far more uneasy if Malfoy was still with him, but "club business" had called him away. "It's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone managed to leave something here."

"But then they would have to have access to the club's roster of clients," Shadow said. Harry could hear her shuffling back and forth. _Generalized nervousness, or is she fearful I might find something here that she doesn't want me to know about? _"No one has access to that except Lord Malfoy and the employees of the club—and even us, not until right before we're scheduled to bring someone to a room. Someone who brought and left a weapon couldn't have _known _that it was Keatson they were going to kill."

"Hmmm." Harry didn't want to expose all his theories at once, and he thought he had given Shadow quite enough to carry back to Malfoy, but even if what she said was true, there were explanations and possibilities. One was that the killer had been a Dark wizard who didn't care whom he killed, as long as someone died; Harry had met people like that, too. The second was that the security around the list wasn't as tight as Shadow thought it was and someone had managed to get hold of it.

Shadow did some more fidgeting while Harry examined the place on the floor they had already told him the body was found. Yes, all trace of blood was gone. Harry rolled his eyes. _Kingsley better let me have a long holiday after this._

He already knew what would happen if he really asked for a holiday, of course. Kingsley would tell him that no one could handle cases like he could, with the perfect combination of swiftness, skill, and discretion, and herd him gently back into doing his job. Harry did get to relax occasionally, but only when most of the criminals in Britain decided to take a simultaneous nap.

While seemingly staring intently at the floor, he conjured a mirror in his palm so that he could see what Shadow was doing without looking over his shoulder. She was staring in another direction, bored.

Harry hissed the spell he had already decided he needed to use under his breath. A sharp-edged wind, turned sideways, slashed a scale from Shadow's hand and fluttered it over to him. Harry left it floating beside him, within the shadow of his robe, for now. He didn't want to touch it and possibly contaminate it. Some of the alterations that people made to their bodies with transformational magic were notoriously fragile.

"Did you feel a bit of a draft in here?" Shadow asked. The mirror showed her rubbing her wrist. The wound wouldn't begin to pain her until hours later, and by then Harry would be gone.

Harry glanced back at her curiously and shook his head. It wasn't hard to conceal a victorious smile. He had the scale now, and he could easily compare it to the scale that had been under Keatson's fingernails and see if it was the same. It certainly _looked _the same.

"Hmmm." Shadow sighed and stared at the floor.

"You don't seem overly concerned about what happened here," Harry noted, standing up and turning around to face her. "Why is that?"

Shadow hunched her shoulders and glared at him. Her forked tongue flickered out, accompanied by another small plume of flame. Harry would enjoy charging her with multiple crimes if it turned out that she was the murderer. "The magic used in the rooms is complex and new," she said stiffly. "It isn't such a surprise that someone would die in one someday. I know that none of us caused his death, so I'm more worried about the idea that you'll decide we did and shut us down."

"You didn't care about Keatson?" Harry let a sympathetic lilt enter his voice. Keatson had seemed the kind of man who would be hard for a woman to care about, if all he wanted was their worship.

"He was a client," Shadow said. "I'm sorry he's dead, but I'm more concerned about the way it affects Corybantes."

_You weren't acting concerned, _Harry thought, but decided to let it go for now. Shadow could be an innocent person who just didn't think about the way her actions and words made her appear—and Harry knew plenty of them—or she might have something to hide. If so, Harry didn't want her to think he had any reason to suspect her. He nodded and looked around the room one more time before he said, "I think I'm done here."

He stepped out, and Shadow shut the door behind him. Then she caught his hand. Harry held still, settling for a raised eyebrow. He did have to wonder if Corybantes had trained its employees in a special wrist-grasping program.

"We've heard a lot about you," Shadow said. "I think that we all knew you would walk through our doors someday."

_We _being the employees of Corybantes, Harry translated to himself. He let his shoulders relax and his eyes grow bright with curiosity. "Because you expected a death in one of those rooms someday?"

Shadow stamped her foot on the floor with frustration, which Harry hadn't observed in anyone above five years old. "No, that's not what I meant. The source of our knowledge about you—"

"That will be all, Shadow."

Malfoy's voice swept the corridor like a desolating breeze. Shadow froze, then bowed and scurried away. Harry turned to face Malfoy, who leaned on the wall with his arms folded and a disapproving scowl on his face, and kept his voice light, though his mind was buzzing with the possibilities. "You don't like your employees gossiping with the Chosen One about his fame?"

Malfoy ignored the question entirely, staring at him in a way that made Harry wonder wearily why their hatred from Hogwarts had lasted for him. Then Malfoy said, in a voice that sounded as if every word had been hammered out of bronze, "I think gossip like that is terribly vulgar, yes, but that's not why I intervened. I know you have questions. I prefer that you ask them of me, and not Shadow."

"All right," Harry said. "The first one. If the fantasies are supposed to appear from the mind of anyone who walks into a room, why didn't your fantasies appear? Or Shadow's, when she took me here?" He jerked his head at the door of the death room.

Malfoy gave him a thin smile. "You ask one that isn't any challenge to answer," he said, and he obviously wanted to make Harry feel that he had failed somehow. Harry raised an eyebrow back. Malfoy dropped the smile and adopted the intense voice again. Harry wished he knew why. "It would distract the clients if the spell-nets reflected the fantasies of people who worked here, even if they only did so for a short time until we could leave the room. Everyone in Corybantes is keyed to the spell-nets so that their mental images don't show up."

Harry nodded. "How sure are you that someone didn't go into the room that Keatson died in and leave a weapon there that could have slaughtered him?"

"Sure."

The tone of that response gave Harry pause. Malfoy sounded as if he would have staked his life on the answer. Harry was used to lies, but he had learned to detect truth as well—or at least lies that someone believed in as the truth. If someone had left a weapon in Keatson's room to claim a random victim, Harry was sure it had not happened with Malfoy's knowledge.

Harry spent a few moments studying him before he spoke again, trying to decide why Malfoy unsettled him so. Yes, he had kept hold of a childish hatred that he should have allowed to die out as the years advanced, but Harry had not been as polite as he could have since he entered the club, either. And it was not as though Harry had expected to be _comfortable_ here. Corybantes represented an indulgence that Harry found intolerable, because it reminded him of the worst excesses of the Dark wizards he hunted.

Perhaps that was it. He had to think of Malfoy the way he would think of a Dark wizard while not being able to arrest him or show his scorn openly, the way he often did. The tension between the two options was wearing at him.

But none of that changed who Malfoy was as a person. None of that should make Harry less able to do his job. Most of the problems he had with Malfoy were _his _problems. Harry couldn't have expected Malfoy to have matured into someone perfectly polite and reliable, who shared his values, but he'd acted like that was a reasonable expectation.

Harry took a deep breath and straightened, deliberately relaxing. It was Malfoy's turn to raise a brow, but Harry tried to keep his voice temperate as he said, "Can I have that list of pseudonyms you promised?"

Malfoy's smile was a smidgen wider, this time. "Tell me why no fantasies came out of your head when we went into the first room."

Harry held his temper sharply under control when it would have responded for him. _Be polite even if he isn't, _he reminded himself. _This is the way you got your reputation. You can't decide what other people do, only what you do._

"I learned Occlumency," he said calmly. "After several unsuccessful attempts, a bad case convinced me that it was for the best if I could keep my thoughts caged. I have my own fantasies, but I doubt your spell-nets could reach out and recruit them."

_A bad case. _Yes, that was one phrase for the several days of torture he'd endured at the hands of Geoffrey Rosier, a Legilimens who specialized in drowning people in their own thoughts. He had made Harry believe that his skin was being flayed off him, that he was being impaled, that he was turning into a swarm of insects, and that Ron and Hermione had betrayed him. Harry had killed him by sheer luck, and worked grimly on his Occlumency afterwards until he mastered it.

No one was going to invade his head again without his say-so.

From that case, too, had come Harry's distaste for many of the kinds of indulgences that Corybantes offered. Why would you _want _to walk into a room and let your thoughts become real around you? There were monsters hidden in the depths of the subconscious. Harry thought they were closer kin to the fantasies than most people knew.

He looked up to find Malfoy watching him with parted lips, his eyes soft and his face bright. Then he said, "That's an excellent reason, Potter. Thank you."

Harry blinked, a bit unnerved, and nodded. "Can I have the list, now?"

"Yes. Of course." Malfoy turned around, and then paused. Harry waited, wondering if Malfoy would demand another revelation from him. He would give it if he absolutely had to—his job was more important than keeping Malfoy ignorant of him—but he would choose his words with more care this time. He thought Malfoy had learned some things from that last confession that Harry didn't want him to know.

"You know, Potter," Malfoy whispered, "not all the pleasures that we give our clients are dark. Some people want violence and worship, but others simply want someone to listen to them, or laugh with them, or cradle them in loving arms."

Harry put a bit of grim humor into his voice, because he had no other way to answer those words. "Those are hardly the kinds of cases I'm likely to be called in about, though, are they?"

Malfoy gave a glance back at him. His eyes were brilliant with pity.

"No," he said, "I reckon not."

Then he left to get the list, and left Harry feeling more open and exposed than he had since the Rosier case.

*

"How soon do you think you'll be able to give me an answer on the Corybantes case, Harry?"

Harry leaned back on his couch and gave a faint smile at Kingsley, whose face hovered in his fire. The Minister looked grim and worn. He always looked like that, though, and only the more grim if no immediate threat was in the offing, and so Harry was not concerned. The day Kingsley showed up with a bright smile, he would know to take out his wand, because Voldemort had come back from the dead and possessed the Minister.

"I can't estimate at this point," Harry said. "I have a suspect, but it's a suspect who could have an innocent explanation. I have the suspicion of secrets in Corybantes, but I don't know that they're the right kind of secrets." The more he thought about it, the more he thought Shadow had been about to reveal something embarrassing to the club, rather than something incriminating, when Malfoy interrupted her. Malfoy would already have sacked Shadow and turned her over to the Aurors if he suspected her. "They've cleaned the death room, so possible clues from the blood stain are gone. I did come to a tentative truce with Malfoy, and he gave me a list of clients who indulge in the same kinds of fantasies that possibly killed Keatson. Progress is going to be steady, but slow."

Kingsley sighed. "I know, Harry, and I shouldn't try to press you. I simply have several well-connected Wizengamot members breathing down my neck on this one, and I'd like it solved as soon as possible."

"I know," Harry said dryly. He had never understood why money and freedom to act seemed to dispose people to be as decadent as possible, but arguing with it was like trying to argue with gravity. "I'll solve it, sir. I promise you that."

Kingsley gave a second martyred sigh that Harry grinned at. After so long in the same business together, they'd become friends, and it didn't hurt at all that the horrible things Harry had seen during his cases and was silent on encouraged him to not talk about _other _things. The Harry Potter Kingsley had hired out of Hogwarts would never have been able to keep his mouth shut about half the political secrets he knew now.

But Harry wasn't that Harry Potter anymore—sometimes to his own discontent and other people's, but once again, it couldn't be helped.

"Have you thought of taking a holiday, Harry?"

Harry kept from rolling his eyes, though the effort made his head ache. And this was another part of the camaraderie he and Kingsley shared, proposing impossible things that neither one of them could do.

"You know that you're not serious, sir," he said.

"Well, no," Kingsley acknowledged, looking unrepentant. "But I still think it would be good if you could make the gesture on occasion. Hermione sometimes comes by and glares at me as if I were a slavedriver."

Harry hid his wince at the mention of Hermione's name the same way he'd hidden the way he wanted to roll his eyes. He still saw his best friends every week; he ate over at their house when time permitted; he was little Hugo's godfather.

But time had put distance between them, time and Harry's job. Ron had dropped out of Auror training inside a year and started helping George with the joke shop. Hermione thought that Harry should do something similar.

"Being an Auror has made you a harder person, Harry," she'd told him a thousand times. "And you don't talk to us anymore."

Harry had tried to explain that he didn't want to disturb their innocence with his stories. Ron and Hermione still didn't know much about what Dark magic could do; their experiences in the war were the limits of their knowledge. Harry didn't want to see horror in their eyes that was associated with _him_, either because he had suffered that horror or because he'd told them about it. He didn't want them to start out of nightmares the way he did, or see a mention of a spell in a book and know exactly how it felt.

But Hermione only glared at him when he said that and continued on complaining that he could tell them anything. And Harry didn't, and the gap that none of them wanted to acknowledge went on growing.

"Harry? Are you listening to me? About that holiday…"

"I'm not taking one yet," Harry said, coming back to himself with a small jerk of his head. He'd ignored Kingsley, and that was unacceptable. Kingsley had more to do than he did, and he managed not to crack under the pressure. The least Harry could do was bear up under the responsibilities that he had freely accepted. "When I've finished the Corybantes case, _maybe_. But don't hold me to that."

Kingsley eyed him, then shook his head. "All right. Let me know the _instant _you need any help, any potions from the supply stores, any backup—"

"I will. Now, go get some sleep," Harry said, congratulating himself on his timing as Kingsley yawned.

Kingsley gave him a dirty look, but said good night and closed the Floo connection. Harry tucked his hands behind his neck and spent a moment watching the fire in peaceful contemplation, wondering whether he should go to bed himself, or spend some time looking over that list of pseudonyms Malfoy had given him.

In the end, he did neither. He looked into the fire instead, watching the sparks that leaped from ember to ember, listening as the wood popped and crackled, and let his mind drift back to the greatest puzzle of the night.

_Malfoy._

The more distance Harry had from him, the more he wondered about him. The Malfoy he knew had been fanatically concerned about purity, and not just with blood. He'd wanted to escape from any taint of poverty, from having the wrong friends, from political failure. Some of that he had no choice but to endure, but he'd tried. Harry couldn't imagine a person like that choosing a career like Corybantes.

Yes, he knew that people had changed. But not many people turned so hard against their former ideals.

_Unless those were never really his ideals at all, and you just thought they were._

Harry nodded slowly. Yes, that was more likely. He had come to rely on his perceptions in the last few years; if he hadn't, he wouldn't have survived. But that didn't mean that his perceptions had been as good when he was a Hogwarts student.

Images of Malfoy flashed through his mind. Hard training in the field had improved his memory, and now speaking a single word or calling up an incantation or a person's name could give him so much information it was ridiculous. Harry coped with the flood by sorting through it for the real gems, the images that would give him a solid grasp on Malfoy instead of on his own prejudices.

There was the way Malfoy had looked when Voldemort forced him to torture people. Revolted, fainting with terror, but knowing that something worse would happen if he tried to run away. That might have given him a disgust with and distrust for reality, Harry supposed. He wouldn't want to inflict real pain on people. Fantasies, though, might be all right.

And they would give him control of the situation, especially if the spell-nets were set up the way he had told Harry, so that no one who came to the club and who might look for blackmail material ever saw the images that thronged _Malfoy's _subconscious.

There was the way he had looked, or felt, when he clasped his arms around Harry's stomach and buried his face in his neck as they fled from the Fiendfyre. He had been fully human in that moment, and Harry couldn't think of him with quite as much hatred as he had before.

And there was the way he had tried so hard to solve the puzzle of the Vanishing Cabinet, putting more effort into that than into his attempts to kill Dumbledore.

How much would it please him to work out ways to please people, and answer wishes that must have seemed unanswerable at first?

Harry smiled. Yes, he could see some continuity between the present and the past Malfoy if he was thinking it out correctly, and on that revelation, he would go to bed.

He hadn't yet figured out why he was so interested, but he reckoned that he had to save some revelations for tomorrow.


	3. Comparisons and Contrasts

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Comparisons and Contrasts_

"Are they the same?" Harry asked, trying to peer over the Potions master's shoulder.

"Will you step back and let me see?"

Harry moved away, abashed. The Potions master he regularly worked with, Adela Pole, was his choice because she cared about nothing outside her work, and so she wasn't likely to blather any secrets. But she did have a frozen manner of speaking, her voice very low, that made Harry miss Snape. At least Snape had given signs of knowing that Harry was alive now and then. Adela didn't know that anything except test vials and certain ingredients existed.

Now Pole held the vial up in front of her face and blew gently on it. That had no effect on the silvery, near-invisible liquid inside it, as far as Harry could see, but she cocked her head as if she had expected it to, and then gave a kind of disappointed grunting sound and laid the vial down on the table in front of her.

"Nothing?" Harry asked, glancing at the first vial. It had a faint sediment of blue on the bottom, all that remained of the scale he'd taken from Shadow's wrist after Pole finished analyzing it.

"What?" Pole turned and stared at him vaguely. "No. They're exactly the same. It's boring." She sighed and moved away from the second vial, which had contained the scale Harry found under Keatson's fingernails, as if it had ceased to interest her.

"But that's _good _news," Harry muttered, leaning in to look at the vials. To his admittedly amateur eye, the blue sediment on the bottom of the vials did look exactly the same. He leaned back and exhaled softly. "I may have a suspect, based on the work that you've done for me," he told Pole. "Thank you."

"They weren't interesting," Pole said, in a voice that would have done credit to a mourning ghost, and then drifted away from Harry among the racks of her tubes and vials and bottles and flasks and silver instruments that were quite as mysterious as Dumbledore's, though Harry knew they were used for different things.

Harry hesitated, but picked up the vials in the end and tucked them in his pockets. They might be useful, and he didn't think that Pole would return to them. She was easily bored and had an excellent memory, so she didn't see why she should repeat an experiment that had already worked once.

He looked up, wanting to say thank you again, but he couldn't see her. A sad noise of scraping and crushing and mortaring came out from among the vials.

Harry crept out, feeling as though he'd left the den of a melancholy dragon.

*

"Good evening, Malfoy." Harry was proud of himself. His voice wasn't only neutral; it held a trace of warmth.

Malfoy might not have noticed. He inclined his head to Harry, his eyes distant, and then turned back to the desk in front of him, which was crowded with paper. Shadow had met Harry at the door of the club and led him straight here. Malfoy apparently couldn't stop work for a moment, not even when Harry might have important information about the crime for him.

Harry narrowed his eyes with anger. The next moment, he felt like laughing. How many times had he waited in some office crowded with paperwork for someone to notice him? There had been Snape, and McGonagall, and Umbridge—who had liked to make him wait to try and "prove" that he was worth nothing—and then Kingsley, though most of the time Kingsley didn't do it on purpose.

Harry found a seat against the wall. It was comfortable, of course. Harry would be surprised if sharp edges or utilitarian pipes and knobs were allowed anywhere near Corybantes. He sat down and tried not to wrinkle his nose at what felt like the crush of carpet against his arse and legs.

Malfoy rustled on through the paperwork, now and then mumbling something violently under his breath. Unlike most mumblers that Harry had met, though, he didn't say the words aloud; he moved his lips fast instead. Probably too concerned to betray secrets even now, Harry thought idly, watching him.

The longer he watched, the more his conjecture of the night before, that Malfoy had changed since Hogwarts, rang true to him. Yes, he had grown into his features and resembled his father, but his movements were abrupt and violent, not controlled, whatever measure of control he might have over his words. He misplaced things, if the way he fumbled through papers was any indication. Now and then he lifted a parchment and stared at the desk as if he couldn't imagine where something had gone. The behavior was familiar to Harry for all sorts of reasons, and he could feel the tug of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

Malfoy glanced up and saw him smiling.

He paused, his nostrils quivering, as if he wanted to decide whether Harry was being offensive or not. Then he pushed his papers out of the way, folded his hands in front of him, and said, "I can give you two minutes."

"Strange to say to the Auror who's investigating the crime that might get your club shut down," Harry said. He kept the hardness out of his voice on purpose. He thought something else was troubling Malfoy, given the way his eyes kept darting different directions, refusing to settle on Harry's face. "I have a suspect now, and I need as much information as you can give me."

Malfoy's eyes widened with something like relief then, and he stared straight at Harry. "A suspect?" he asked. "Who?"

"Shadow."

At once Malfoy's mouth contorted into an ugly sneer. "Ridiculous, Potter. I know that you don't like people who use magic to alter themselves, but to carry your prejudice so far as to suggest that one of my most trusted employees is capable of murder—"

"I found one of her scales under the fingernail of Keatson's right hand," Harry said. "I compared it with a scale from her wrist, and they're exactly the same." He drew out the vials from Pole's lab, glad now that he had brought them. Malfoy had been good at Potions, and this kind of evidence would impress him. "A Ministry Potions master used the same process to test them." He passed the vials across the desk.

Malfoy took them and studied them in silence. His eyes got narrower, his mouth got smaller, but he made no sound before he returned the vials to Harry. Harry took them, still watching Malfoy's eyes. He looked as though he had just sustained an unexpected blow, and no wonder. Harry had felt like that when it turned out several Aurors had betrayed the Ministry and lied their way successfully into high positions. He'd worked beside those people for years, believing them, trusting in the integrity of the Ministry.

_It hurts to have your dream taken away from you._

"What are you going to do?" asked Malfoy, in a voice that held no expression.

"Talk to her," Harry said. "Simply talk to her. There may be an innocent explanation for this." _Though I can't imagine what it is. Especially since the first scale was in the position it could have been if Keatson was clawing with his hands at someone who had a knife against his throat. _"Then I'll make an arrest if I trust that I have enough evidence. I may ask her to undergo Veritaserum interrogation, but it'll depend on the answers I get."

Malfoy surged to his feet. "I want to be present."

"Of course," Harry murmured, standing up. If Malfoy thought Harry was prejudiced against people who altered their bodies, then he would want to ensure Shadow's safety, and if the interrogation revealed incriminating facts, Malfoy would want to know them. "Do you have a private room, fantasy-free, that we can use to confront her?"

"Don't use the word _confront_, Potter," Malfoy said, his voice abstracted and his eyes focused inwards. "It's vulgar. We'll talk to her."

Harry kept his peace about the fact that he had used those words before he used "confront," and nodded Malfoy out the door.

However, Malfoy had only taken two steps before he whirled around again and gripped Harry's wrist in the way he had held it the last time Harry was in Corybantes. "I'm glad you're here, Potter," he whispered. "So glad it was you."

Then he dropped Harry's hand and hurried down the corridor. Harry followed him slowly, one eyebrow raised.

*

"I simply want to know how your scale got under Keatson's fingernail," Harry said. "There has to be some explanation for that, and I want to know what it is."

Shadow darted an anguished look towards Malfoy. Malfoy, sitting in a chair beside Harry, regarded her with folded arms and a cold face. Even Harry, who had had practice in looking through more than one "closed" expression, couldn't read a trace of what he felt in his eyes or his mouth now.

He was reading other things from Shadow, though, things that disturbed him more and more.

_Whatever the secret is that she was going to tell me the other day, I think Malfoy knows about it. She seems to fear speaking without his permission, or maybe she fears betraying him even if she doesn't speak._

The thought made Harry wince. He didn't want Malfoy to be guilty of obstructing justice or murder or conspiracy to murder. Malfoy had begun to impress him, or at least seem human. Harry rarely got to have sympathy with people in his cases, because most of the people he met were Dark wizards or people trying to protect the Dark wizards; their victims were often dead, the families and relatives held away from the investigation for their own good.

Harry could appreciate, all over again, the way he had chosen to operate in the last few years, distant from most emotional ties. It certainly made cases like this easier.

Shadow finally swallowed, lowered her eyes, and said, as if she had decided to answer honestly, "It got there when I was moving him. His fingernails scratched against my arm, and a scale came off."

That was the sort of simple explanation Harry had thought might be true, and the reason he had been reluctant to call Shadow a suspect from the beginning. But he would need proof. It wasn't easy for a hanging hand—especially the hand of a dead man, that couldn't move of its own free will—to tear skin off, after all. "May I see?" he asked, and lifted his wand in the open this time.

Shadow bared her wrist with pathetic eagerness, her eyes darting to Malfoy again. He had turned his head slightly and was peering into a corner of the room. Studying the construction of the spell-nets, Harry hoped, and not thinking up a deception.

The spell he cast created a replica of his fingernail, and he scraped it gently against Shadow's wrist. A scale tore off at once, embedded under the nail in exactly the same way as Harry had seen it embedded under Keatson's.

He sighed. Well, now Shadow was probably innocent, but he didn't have a suspect. "Damn," he said.

"Can I go now?" Shadow was on her feet, all but wringing her hands. Harry wanted to shake his head in amusement. It was a long time since he had encountered a criminal so nervous, if only because Dark magic gave most of its practitioners the confidence that they would never be caught.

"Yes, you can," Harry said. He'd asked all the questions he could think of that might have revealed her to have some part in Keatson's death, and received only that anxious silence or blistering denials. He watched as she ducked out of the room, and made up his mind slowly. He didn't _think _she was lying. It would help if he could have more proof, but the chances of that were small, since the body had been moved and the bloodstain destroyed.

_Unless…_

It was not something Harry would have asked ordinarily. But nothing about this case was ordinary, even by his standards. Malfoy and Shadow seemed like liars, but everything they told him appeared to be true. So Harry turned to Malfoy and asked, "Would you be willing to put your memories of the body into a Pensieve?"

Malfoy turned to look at him. His eyes were enormous, like moons, his pupils blown. Harry arched an eyebrow. He wondered for a moment if Malfoy was drugged. Perhaps the vices of Corybantes' clients extended to the owner.

But Malfoy blinked and was himself again. "If you think it would help," he said.

"It would have helped for you not to clean up that room," Harry snapped. "But given that you did, this is the next best thing. I need to see what the blood looked like and exactly how the body was lying."

Malfoy gave him a condescending smile. "Corybantes is devoted to helping people fulfill their fantasies," he said, with odd emphasis on several of the words. "We had to have the room ready so that we could put another client into it. Otherwise, we would have delayed the fulfillment of that man's fantasies or turned him away, and either is unacceptable."

"This crime could mean that Corybantes is shut down," Harry said. "Isn't that risk greater to you than the one that you might disappoint someone?"

"Maybe in an ordinary business, it would be," Malfoy said unrepentantly. "But I know that no one in this club killed Keatson. And I don't think you heard me. We _need _to fulfill fantasies."

Harry stared at him, and studied the wide eyes again. "You mean that you need to," he said. "I doubt that Shadow and your other employees care that much."

"Yes," Malfoy said. "You are beginning to understand now. I founded Corybantes to do something that I wanted to do." He leaned forwards, and Harry found himself leaning in in response before he thought about the consequences.

But Malfoy didn't try to poison him or punch him or spit in his face. He was speaking in a voice as intense as his gaze, and with an awe in the back of his tone that fascinated Harry. He didn't think he'd ever heard Malfoy sound _reverent _about anything. Smug was the closest he'd come to it.

"There were so many things I didn't get to do during the war," Malfoy whispered. "I felt the desires burning in me, torturing me. The desire to survive, the desire to be free, the desire to make sure that _he _could never hurt my parents again. And then, when the war ended, there was still not enough of what I wanted. My father was imprisoned. My mother…" He shook his head. "I couldn't join them. I had to go out into the world and work, because the Ministry also took most of our Galleons. And the only thing I wanted all the time was a way to fulfill my desires and to go on doing that.

"I thought about this club the second day I was sitting in a miserable room with people looking at me doubtfully because I didn't have any provable skills except ones that were illegal. Why shouldn't I create a place that would allow me to provide desire-fodder continually? It would give me power. It would give me freedom. It would give me money.

"And it gave me kindred, Potter. It gave me those who were as eager to find fulfillment for their desires as I was, and as outcast from society because no one thought their wishes worthwhile. A fantasy is an effervescent thing, but while it burns, it makes you look at the world through flame. The aftereffects are more important than the immediate impulse. Satisfied people pay good money and lead happier lives."

Harry licked his lips. His Occlumency would prevent his own fantasies from creeping out in response to the spell-nets, but he could still think about them, and he knew what Malfoy meant. The desire for a change, for a rest, for someone who would trust Harry and be worthy of trust sometimes ached in him as if he had a chronic disease.

Of course, his common sense came back in the next moment and rescued Harry. Malfoy's eyes shone with a fanatic's luster. He might have a purpose that seemed praiseworthy, but he himself couldn't be trusted. If he thought that fantasies were that important, what might he not do to fulfill them and keep the club open? Hiding evidence and lying would be nothing to him.

And Harry wasn't a client.

"Thank you for telling me that," he said pulling back and giving Malfoy as polite a smile as he could. "It at least explains why several clues that would have assisted me vanished. Will you give me permission to view your memories?"

Malfoy smiled quietly. The fervor had passed out of his voice as if it had never come. He studied Harry now, and then he rose from his chair and circled behind him. Harry tensed. While he was reasonably sure he was more talented with his wand than Malfoy, it never paid to underestimate an enemy, and Malfoy probably knew more Dark magic than he did.

On the other hand, showing fear when he didn't understand Malfoy's motives would be stupid. So Harry continued to stare straight ahead, and he made sure that his voice was calm when he spoke. "The memories?" he asked.

Malfoy bent down towards him, resting his chin on Harry's shoulder. His hands descended at the same time, one of them pressing on Harry's other shoulder, the second on his spine. Harry ground his teeth. Malfoy was so close that he couldn't miss the sound, and he might take it for the warning it was and back off.

"Before I give you an answer," Malfoy whispered, "I want you to give me one. What _are _your fantasies? I know that they exist now. Tell me. I would give much to fulfill them for you."

"Why should I?" Harry held still because the force of his resentment was so strong that the only other option was leaping out of the chair and away from Malfoy's touch. "They have nothing to do with this case."

"I told you," Malfoy said, and now his voice sounded like a lover's, and Harry gritted his teeth again, this time in resentment at himself for even thinking of that comparison. "I find my kindred in those people whose fantasies I can fulfill. I want to know what yours are. It makes me uneasy to have someone in Corybantes whose wants I don't know, who I can't do something for. And then, you're volunteering your time and talent to solve a death that could get us shut down. It's only right to repay you."

"The Ministry pays me." Harry kept his voice steady as he stood and walked away from Malfoy, pretending to examine an ugly gold decoration on the wall. Corybantes seemed to do advertising even in the back rooms that most clients would never see. Harry wondered idly who would be persuaded by gold decorations of heads covered with snakes. He turned around and studied Malfoy when he thought he had himself under control. "You don't need to do anything extra. If you refuse to give me your memories, then I'll ask for those of Shadow or another witness."

Malfoy rose slowly to his feet and moved backwards until his face was in shadow. The anti-light was on the walls in here, too. It made it far too easy for enemies to hide. Harry waited, his eyes attuned to Malfoy's movements. If this was an ambush, no one would find it easy to surprise him.

"You act as if you would be attacked in the middle of my club," Malfoy said. He sounded _aggrieved, _of all the strange things. "Why? What makes you act this way?"

"You act as if you want to treat me like a client one moment and an Auror the next," Harry said. "Why?"

Malfoy moved back into the light, scowling as he tilted his head and his pale hair slipped down his neck. It made him look as if he were standing under an icy waterfall. "I already explained my reasons to you, Potter," he said, "far more reasons than most people ever hear from me."

"I don't need to know them," Harry said. He was master of the situation again, and could resist the impulse to lash out with magic or with a fist. Malfoy had given him enough time to recover, thank Merlin. "I didn't ask for them. I only ask for certain things that I need to help me in the case, and you demand strange bargains in exchange for them or refuse them altogether. While I'm trying to do my job, you act as if you didn't want the case solved."

Malfoy took a sudden step back, and tried to conceal it by turning around to examine the walls himself. But Harry had seen it. He'd remember it.

"One of my fantasies was always having your friendship," Malfoy said, his voice muffled. "And you're going to deny me the chance to fulfill it."

Harry sighed, because if he didn't release _some _of his frustration, he was going to explode. "If we had met outside a case, and I was willing, maybe we could go some distance towards fulfilling it," he said. "As it is, you're preventing me from doing my job. That's more important than an imaginary friendship."

"Not to me," Malfoy whispered.

_I was wrong about how much he'd changed, _Harry decided in disgust. _Even if he's more open and more courageous than I thought he was, he's still acting like a spoiled child by demanding what he wants exactly when he wants it._

"Will you let me have your memories, or should I ask someone else?" he said. This was the last time he would make the request. He froze himself and waited, half-thinking that Malfoy would just stand there in sulky silence and let him walk out of the room without a further word.

Instead, Malfoy turned around and stalked back over to him. Harry held his position easily. He wasn't afraid of this overgrown boy.

Not even when Malfoy pushed him up against the wall and grabbed his wrist—his favorite target—again did Harry feel his heart beating much faster. He met Malfoy with a stare of calm and clear-eyed scorn and waited.

"I've wanted more of you than you can know," Malfoy whispered. "Friendship. Notice. Attention. The Snitch, when we still played Quidditch opposite each other. Your presence in my club, during the time when we first became popular and I thought that even the Chosen One might need a place to relax. And again and again, you must disappoint me." Those last words sounded threatening instead of sulky this time.

"Have you listened to yourself, Malfoy?" Harry asked. "You want something _of_ me, which is another way of saying _from _me. You're not getting upset because you asked for a gift and I refused you. You're upset because you wanted to profit off me or triumph over me in some way, and I wouldn't let you. What makes you different from all the people who've wanted me to endorse their products, or give them exclusive interviews, or let them kill or fuck me?"

Malfoy staggered back, his face stricken. Harry frowned at him. He knew he wasn't that good with words. Malfoy shouldn't have acted as though he'd just received a Killing Curse to the heart.

"I'll give you the memories," Malfoy said in a voice like dust. "Come with me."

And he left, leaving Harry to trail behind him, and then hurry so that he didn't get left behind altogether by Malfoy's rapid strides.

_I don't want to hurt him. I don't want to repeat the things we did when we were children, _Harry thought, staring at Malfoy's back and the way he hunched his shoulders as if it was raining on him._ I just wish he would stop acting like I'm here for some reason other than my job, and give me what I need to solve the bloody case._


	4. Pensieve Thoughts and Pensive Thoughts

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Pensieve Thoughts and Pensive Thoughts_

Harry watched carefully as Malfoy touched his wand to his temple and drew out a strand of memory that he deposited in the Pensieve in the center of the table. Malfoy could whirl around and cast a curse at Harry with his wand at that angle; nothing easier.

And maybe he would, since he seemed to have taken such a blow from those careless words of Harry's earlier. The only thing Harry could do was stand ready and counteract the curse the moment he saw it flying.

But Malfoy stepped back and into the corner when he finished. He stared at the Pensieve, sighed, and turned his head by slow degrees to face Harry. "There's the memory of what I saw in the room where Keatson died," he said simply. "Go ahead and look at it, though I don't know if you can discover anything to help you."

Harry nodded. "Thank you." His voice was clipped, but he couldn't help that. He was struggling between regret at having hurt Malfoy and confusion over what else he was supposed to do. Malfoy had acted as though Harry had flung himself at his feet and begged for his tender attentions. It was distracting and stupid. Harry just wanted to get through the case and leave the club again. Malfoy had to have known that, since Harry's distaste had been obvious from the first minute he entered Corybantes.

_You can tell people what's wrong as clearly as you can and still no one listens to you, _Harry thought as he stepped up to the Pensieve.

He had never lost his dislike of ducking his head into someone else's memories, since fifth year when he had invaded Snape's and discovered more than he wanted to. But this was far from the worst thing about this case, so he did it.

There was the usual spinning and falling sensation, and then he came back to himself in a corridor outside the room Keatson had used. Shadow was looking anxiously at Malfoy, who had sprinted up to the door and was examining it with a frown. Harry could see other employees of the club behind him, one with a lizard's crest, one with white fur all over her face, and one with a lion's tail and scraping goat's hooves that made Harry think uneasily of unicorn fetishists.

"The wards couldn't have fallen and let someone inside," Malfoy said. "That's not possible."

His voice was brisk and decisive, his face mobile with emotion as he looked between Shadow and the door. Harry was startled. Malfoy had never looked or sounded like that in front of him since he came to Corybantes. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to be languid and decadent, or else more fervent in a way that rang all sorts of alarms in Harry's mind.

_That means he's not being honest with me about his emotions. Not that he has to tell me everything he feels. But what's the point of a deception that artistic?_

Shadow leaned forwards and timidly touched Malfoy's arm. "Do you think you should go in, sir? I mean, if you—"

She flushed and fell silent under the look that Malfoy cast her. Harry nodded slowly. _So even when I'm not around, there are things he doesn't want to talk to her about. Interesting._

"It's my duty to see for myself," said Malfoy softly, firmly, and then opened the door and stepped into the room.

Harry wondered if the body would be moved; it seemed that Shadow had already found it and then fetched Malfoy. But Keatson lay on the floor with his eyes turned up towards the ceiling. The blood around him was still fresh, and sparkled on his robes and the floor. The gaping wound in his throat looked no different from the way that Harry had seen it, except for the blood actually flowing from it.

Harry narrowed his eyes. There was one thing that he hadn't expected, though given the non-specificity of the descriptions from Shadow and Malfoy, they could have told him about it and he might have assumed they meant something else. A long blood smear covered the floor _behind _Keatson, as if he had been dragged across the ground on his front before someone flipped him over. At least, Harry couldn't imagine that there would be that much blood, thick as paint, in the smear unless it had come directly from the throat wound.

He walked forwards to look at the smear while Malfoy sighed and gave orders about cleaning up the room. If necessary, he would rewatch the memory to take note of Malfoy's exact words and the expression on his face, but so far it didn't sound like anything that he hadn't expected.

The smear was easily a foot wide, and pointed like an awkwardly angled arrow at Keatson's neck. Harry whistled through his teeth. He had a new possibility for how Keatson had died now, which the position of the throat wound had prevented him from seeing at first: he might have been facing his attacker and even struggled with him, then fallen to the floor with the blood literally spouting from the vein.

Shadow was the one who came forwards to magic the blood up. Harry turned to look over her ducking head and saw Malfoy standing with his arms folded as he looked down at Keatson. His face was bleak, but Harry didn't see shock in the lines around his eyes.

He sighed once, and murmured something that Harry couldn't make out and doubted he could even if he rewatched the memory. Then he stooped over the body and studied the robes and the blood for a moment.

This time, Harry was close enough to hear Malfoy's words, which were soft but not quite a whisper. "Fantasy wasn't enough to satisfy you in the end. I hope that you're finally satisfied, and that your afterlife, if there's such a thing, is happier than your life." He let his hand reach out until his fingers hovered over Keatson's cheek, though he didn't actually touch the skin, and then gave him a small bow and stood up.

Harry snorted. _That doesn't sound like someone who was surprised that Keatson died. _

Which meant that Malfoy might have been lying all along.

_If he's trying to protect someone in his club who did the killing just so he can keep Corybantes open, I'm going to kill _him.

Harry shut his eyes as a whirling surrounded him, marking the end of the memory. He would have to ask Malfoy about his words, but he would try to do it without making the words harsh enough to wound him again.

_If I only knew why my words wounded him in the first place._

*

Harry lifted his head from the Pensieve and shook his hair back from his face. Then he turned to Malfoy and opened his mouth for the first question.

Malfoy's expression silenced him. In the time that Harry was viewing his memories, Malfoy seemed to have recovered his pride. His head was lifted as though he intended to break empires with his chin, and his hands were clasped behind his back. He could have been mistaken as courteous if you weren't familiar with his face. But Harry had learned a good deal about that in the last few days.

"I don't deserve to be scolded and taunted by you, Potter," Malfoy said, his eyes glittering with cold light, his voice soft and light as snowfall. "I think from now on, we should confine our discussion purely to the topic of the case."

It was what Harry had asked for. It was what he had thought only a short time ago he would have been grateful for.

But now an unexpected sense of loss shivered through him, and it was another moment before he could decide how to respond.

"I want to know why you spoke to Keatson as if you knew that he was likely to die someday," Harry said. "You told him that fantasy wasn't enough to satisfy him in the end. Why did you say that? It implies that you know how he died or at least why, and yet you told me that the fantasies in the rooms couldn't kill the clients." By the end of the speech, Harry's confidence had come back. Malfoy's reserve should have been present from the beginning. They would get along just fine now that he was behaving like a business owner unfortunately implicated in a crime instead of someone who wanted to—

What?

Despite Malfoy's speech, Harry had to admit that he still didn't know what the point of Malfoy's little drama had been. He might have fantasies about Harry's friendship, but he couldn't think they would translate into reality in _this _particular situation, surely? Not when Harry had to suspect him and some of the people connected to Corybantes?

Harry meant what he had said: if he had met Malfoy outside the case, then he would have been more open to offers of friendship. But not when there was a dead body between them to make things so much more complicated.

"I meant what I said." Malfoy's voice was low. "I sometimes suspected that Keatson would destroy himself. I simply never thought that he would manage to use our club to do so."

Harry blinked. "You told me that your fantasies couldn't kill or permanently harm your clients no matter what happened."

"They cannot." Malfoy was standing very still now, and Harry suspected that he was trying to hold in frustrations of his own. "However, that would not prevent Keatson from trying to figure out a way around them. And the magic is experimental." His nostrils flared. "It hasn't been used long enough to work out every loophole. I tested it for the effects on our clients, our employees, and myself, and was not satisfied without meticulous research. That doesn't mean that someone who was determined enough couldn't have researched a way around my research, or noticed something about the interaction of spells that I didn't."

Harry restrained a shout at Malfoy, but it was difficult. "Why didn't you tell me that at once? It would have saved me needless worry about you and Shadow and given a new direction to the investigation."

"It was a conclusion that came to me just now, as I watched you with your head in my memories, and combined the new thought with my observation of Keatson's behavior over the last several months." Malfoy's voice was cool. "May I have access to my memories now?" He brushed past Harry and extended his wand to pick up the silvery strand of thought.

Harry bristled but moved out of the way, because he wasn't about to risk a physical confrontation with Malfoy right now.

"It was never my intention to scold or taunt you," he told Malfoy's back. "It was my intention to solve the goddamn case. Anything that gets in the way of that is a distraction that I can't afford. And neither can you, if you actually want to keep Corybantes open and help people with their fantasies the way you said you did."

Malfoy didn't turn around or respond for long minutes, as though the process of fishing the memory out of the Pensieve was more complicated than it looked. Harry waited. He intended to look through Keatson's personal effects, now that he had certain reasons to suspect suicide, and they would still be there when Malfoy turned to face him.

Then Harry started wondering why it was so important to for him to get Malfoy to face him, and he had to admit, with a small squirm, that he didn't exactly know.

_Very well, I do know. I want to understand Malfoy, and I want to apologize for hurting him, or see some acceptance of my apology. I can't do that as long as he's looking away from me._

Malfoy leaned an elbow on the Pensieve when he finally deigned to look at Harry. His eyes were deep and serious, and they searched Harry's face in a way that made him uneasy. He straightened and pushed his hair behind his ears, then told himself that was a nervous gesture and he had no reason to make it. He dropped his hand and tried to look serious and professional.

"I have it on good authority," Malfoy said, his voice colder than Harry had heard it since Hogwarts, "that the famous Harry Potter hasn't taken a holiday since he joined the Ministry. I know that he hasn't tried to take one, either. I know that no one knows him anymore, and the papers write stories about how cold and brooding he is. They weave a romantic fantasy around it, talking about their hero's scarred soul and how he needs that special someone to melt his heart and move into it." Malfoy sneered. "I deal in fantasies, Potter. I know exactly how much that one is worth."

Harry frowned at him. "I'm glad you do. I have taken holidays sometimes in the past. I was just usually called back from them early. Tell anyone you see spreading that lie that you know better, from me."

Malfoy shook his head. "I was speaking of that lie about your being a romantic, lonely hero. I know the difference between someone like that and someone who is cold and closed-off because he hasn't bothered to let any human interaction into his life in years."

"I have friends," Harry said shortly. "I'm a godfather. I have co-workers in the Ministry I'm close to." He thought of walking away, or of telling Malfoy that he had no right to this information, but either might jeopardize the investigation, and Kingsley wouldn't like either of them. "You don't know me any better than the papers do."

"Maybe before you came here, I didn't," Malfoy said. "But I've seen hundreds of people walk into Corybantes with that little lost sheep look on their faces. They don't know what they want when they come through that door." He had straightened, and his voice had grown smoother and nobler. "One of the most beautiful things that we do here is teach them."

"I keep telling you," Harry said, feeling his control grow more fragile and crack as Malfoy recovered his. "I'm not a client. If you stopped trying to relate to me like I was, then maybe both of us would get ahead in this case."

"But you could be," Malfoy said. He paused, his eyes darting over Harry as though he could see something more behind his face than what Harry wanted to show him, and then added, "And I think you should become one."

Harry swore under his breath. He allowed himself that indulgence because he knew he would explode otherwise, and that would set the investigation back further. "You keep letting this get in the way of telling me the truth and cooperating with me," he said, when he could manage words that weren't obscenities. "And I told you, I have to solve the murder first. I owe that to Keatson, and to Kingsley, who put me on the case himself."

"And what about what you owe yourself?" Malfoy whispered.

Harry paused. He was so angry that he had expected words to come to his lips immediately, but they didn't. He frowned uneasily, knowing how Malfoy would interpret that.

"I can't answer that question," he said at last, when Malfoy's lips had curved in a smug grin that seemed to creep further and further up the sides of his face. Harry turned around and started towards the door of the club. "I assume that the people responsible for keeping Keatson's documents know about the connection to the club?" he added over his shoulder. "I don't want to betray any information that's secret." He knew the question was stupid as he spoke it—after all, Corybantes was the place Keatson had died, so his executors knew about that if nothing else—but he needed some time to recover himself.

"You don't know the answer to that question because you're a coward."

Harry stopped, his shoulders rising in irritation. He told himself that he should keep marching. What was there in Malfoy's words but one more insult? He didn't have to listen to it; he didn't have to admit it had any influence over him. He could leave, and Malfoy would realize he had said something stupid and have to consider it.

But for some reason, he couldn't choose to depart, any more than he could choose about having a hook embedded in his flesh. Malfoy's words had caught him that powerfully. Harry turned around and tried uselessly to keep his face smooth as he said, "Tell me why I'm a coward."

Malfoy detached himself from the Pensieve and slinked towards Harry. His eyes were bright with a cat-like satisfaction, and even though he didn't touch Harry this time, he didn't need to. His gaze was as heavy as a touch.

"Because you'll probe into hard truths as long as they concern other people," he said. "You don't want to think critically about the choices you've made or what they've cost you. You don't want to change your behavior when it might be hurtful."

Harry felt his mouth fall open slightly. That was not at all what he had expected Malfoy to say. Among other things, it seemed impossible that he should have hurt Malfoy that much, since this was only his second day of investigation into the crime. And he doubted that Malfoy knew or cared about anything he might have done in the last few years to hurt Ron, Hermione, or Kingsley.

"Look," he said at last. "I _have _thought long and hard about how I have to handle my emotions. I've seen enough horrible things that I wouldn't survive if I just went about blathering my feelings with an open mouth and sobbing because I wanted to shed tears. I know that there's a cost to it. But the cost would be worse if I was open."

"Be open in private, then," Malfoy said, and his voice had turned smoky with intensity. "Show the world the hard Auror they need to see, and keep your private self for those who can appreciate it." He was still five feet away, but Harry felt the pressure on him as if the distance separating them was a few inches. "For me."

Harry wanted to laugh, to scoff, to march away, or to give Malfoy a serious speech about how that was impossible while he still had to suspect Malfoy of lying or at least of preventing Shadow from telling Harry the truth. But the answer was so unexpected that he stood there, blinking, and didn't give the absolute denial that he should have.

"It doesn't matter what your fantasies are," Malfoy said, his face pinched and hungry, like someone who'd stood next to a feast for hours while he was starving. "I've seen worse. Besides, I don't believe _you_ could ever have revolting fantasies." His voice was caressing, and he leaned forwards as if he wanted to stroke Harry's arm, but didn't actually do so. "I've hosted people more paranoid than you are, too. You wouldn't have to worry about your secrets escaping to the outside world through me or any of my employees."

Harry cleared his throat. "It's tempting, Malfoy." It had to be tempting, or he would have found his inner balance and moved away by now. And fuck, he did have that bloody ache that wanted expression of some private emotions, wanted to lie still and trust that the person holding him would not betray him.

He would give a lot for a good massage, for that matter, where he could just concentrate on the loosening of his muscles in a way that he couldn't when his mind was running on the case for the next day.

_The case. _

His discipline rescued him from an indulgence that he knew he couldn't afford. Harry opened his eyes and shook his head. "But not while I'm on an investigation," he said. "And not—I don't think you would want to see me around here."

Malfoy's face closed, and he stepped back again. "What have I said since you've entered my doors that has given you that impression? If anything, the impression I wanted you to take is the opposite one."

"I did hurt you with what I said," Harry said quietly. "And there's nothing I can offer you in return, except money, which you seem to have plenty of." Malfoy's face grew longer and more strained. Harry shrugged. "My fantasies aren't elaborate. I don't want to change myself into an animal, like Shadow, or have wild sex against a wall. There wouldn't be much for you to do or arrange for me."

"Even that is more than I knew before," Malfoy said, and licked his lips. "Thank you, Potter. I have a much better idea now of why you wouldn't consent to come to Corybantes." He stepped around Harry as if he was going back to his office, then bent and brought his lips near his ear. "And a much better idea of how to make sure that you _do _consent."

Harry shivered and folded his arms. "You give off a creepy air at times, you know," he said, in an attempt to turn the conversation light again. "I wondered whether you were drugged or hadn't had enough sleep when I was questioning Shadow."

"I had been dreaming of you too long," Malfoy said, his voice smooth. "When I realized that my dream was close to me, in the flesh, I'm afraid I acted like an idiot. I didn't think about how that would look to someone who of course hadn't shared the same dreams with me, who didn't even know that I had them."

"You dreamed about me?" Harry's words croaked. He was half-convinced that he'd moved into a surreal world where the opposite of what he expected happened every day. He'd probably go around the corner and see Ron in the embrace of a lamia next.

"You hadn't picked that up by now?" Malfoy's hand slid down onto his shoulder and squeezed. "I'm not sure if I'm more displeased or startled by your innocence."

Harry tensed and stepped away. Malfoy dropped his hand at once and stood looking at him, instead of trying to pursue him and pressing the matter. Harry shook his head, feeling as if his breath were coming short, though he knew that in reality he was breathing as freely as ever. "I don't—I have no idea what you want me to say. This is a shock, Malfoy." His voice was rising, and he cut it off with a little huff.

"I know," Malfoy said. His eyes looked enormous again, but this time, from the small smile that he wore, Harry thought he was simply having trouble containing his excitement. "But I've told you now. It's up to you what to do about it. Of course you don't have to come to Corybantes simply to indulge my fantasies. I'd much prefer it if you came to indulge your own." He took a step away, with a smirk fastened in place.

"I couldn't live up to your fantasy," Harry said, snatching at straws, because the thought that Malfoy would be satisfied by him was stranger than the thought that Malfoy wanted him. "I couldn't compare with your dreams."

"Why don't you let me," Malfoy asked, his voice deepening, "be the judge of that?" He winked at Harry, and this time left the corridor.

Harry shut his eyes and slapped lightly at his own cheek. Corybantes was a place of dreams, but for fuck's sake, that was no excuse for falling into those dreams when he visited the club.

The slap didn't wake him up. He still stood there in the heated dark and listened to groans and gasps and distant laughter, and coped with the fact of being someone's fantasy.

But even _that _didn't make sense, he thought as he left. He'd known he was plenty of people's fantasies, and he hadn't reacted like this. What Malfoy had said and did to him made sense now.

What didn't was his own response.


	5. Slit Throats and Silences

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Slit Throats and Silences_

"Pascal's final papers are through here." The voice of the woman who had met Harry at the door was low, and she kept one cloth in front of her face at all times, as though the light through the dim windows hurt her eyes. From the one unqualified look he'd got at her, when she opened the door, Harry thought that it was weeping that had done the damage. "Of course you're welcome to look through any of them. We have already, but—we're not sure how much significance to attach to what we found." Her robes were thick, but Harry could still see the shudder that ran up her spine.

He gently touched her shoulder, and waited until she looked back at him. She had dark blue eyes and hair that was already going grey, though Harry thought she was only in her late thirties. "Madam Keatson," he said, struggling to remember her first name. Anna, he thought. "What did you find?"

Anna Keatson swallowed, and her hands twisted the cloth. "Shouldn't you investigate for yourself, without knowing?" she asked. "After all, we might prejudice your conclusions if we explain what disturbed us."

Harry smiled at her and shook his head. "Any knowledge is useful in a case like this, madam. After all, there might be things you would notice and I wouldn't."

Anna looked at the ground for a moment, then glanced up at him. "We found many, many depictions of suicide," she said quietly. "At first, we feared that he might have committed suicide. But none of the figures had his face."

Harry nodded comfortingly. He would let the family—Anna was the victim's sister—believe what they needed to believe. He himself had been on too many cases to discard suicide as a motive because of something as small as that.

"On the other hand," she said, and by this time her voice was a whisper that Harry would have found hard to hear if he hadn't been trained to hear far softer things, "we found other papers that show someone with his face abusing other people." She gave the shudder again, and glanced up at Harry. "I can't help thinking that maybe he died trying to kill someone else, someone who murdered him instead. I can't—it doesn't fit with the Pascal I knew, but I'm starting to think that I didn't really know him."

Harry gently gripped her arm and rubbed up and down. Normally he didn't touch people he interacted with on cases, but she looked like she needed a firm hand just at the moment. "Mr. Malfoy says that no one but the fantasies could have intruded into those rooms," he said. "Your brother went there to enjoy his interactions with imaginary people. They've discovered no evidence that anyone else was present."

Once again, he kept what he thought to himself. There were so many of his thoughts down the years that other people hadn't needed to know, because, if they did, they would only get upset. Or they were simply private suspicions that would be proved wrong in the end. Harry saw no need to burden anyone else with _those,_ either.

Silence was the rule of his life. It was a good rule. Harry didn't know what had possessed him to feel as if the rule was broken inside Corybantes.

But he wasn't inside Corybantes now, and he was in control of himself again. Harry liked the way that felt. He smiled more broadly at Anna and imitated the voice of the Healers who had talked to him after his first partner died—through Harry's sheer _carelessness_, something he would never forget. "It could have been suicide. It might have been murder in some way that Mr. Malfoy doesn't think is possible right now. But I can assure you that if your brother fought back, it was self-defense, not because he had gone there prepared to hurt someone."

Anna nodded, tears starting to her eyes. "Thank you." She hesitated, then added, "The rest of the family doesn't feel it like I do. They say Pascal had become a stranger. He _did_, but there had to be some reason that he decided he couldn't talk to us. I'd like to know as much as I can, Auror Potter. Please."

"I understand that," Harry said softly, his voice deepening in spite of himself. Kingsley hadn't wanted him to spend so long discussing Warren's death with the other Aurors who'd been there; he'd been sure that knowing more about it would make Harry blame himself more. But Harry had needed to know the _extent _of that blame, and he'd discovered so much that might have been hidden from him if he hadn't looked. Those errors could have killed another partner for him. Instead, the next two had survived, and then Harry had started working on his own and it was no longer an issue. "I'll make sure you get the information you need, madam."

Anna squeezed his arm and went back to the door without speaking. Harry opened the door of the room that had been Keatson's private study, where most of his papers had been found.

Looking at a victim's room could often tell Harry something about them, even more than with a criminal. After all, most victims weren't interested in hiding evidence of their activities like Dark wizards were. He just stood in the doorway for several minutes, looking around.

The room was blue and white, brilliant colors rather than soothing ones. The walls were the color of fine sapphires in between windows that were painted a startling ivory shade. The white curtains on them billowed softly in the breeze traveling through the open windows. The curtains themselves were fine net, woven into elaborate patterns when Harry looked closely. The furniture was mahogany and ebony, so well-made that Harry, who knew almost nothing about furniture, had to stand there and admire it.

Keatson had loved beautiful things. Harry wasn't sure right now how that fitted into the rest of what he knew about him, but it was certainly interesting.

Harry stepped into the room at last and studied it again from the center. The desk that held the papers dominated half the room, aimed at the largest window, which faced east. A shelf along the wall contained books that Harry would need to examine more closely. Two tall chairs near the western window faced each other. Two people could have been sitting in them, facing each other and engaging in conversation.

Maybe. Harry somehow doubted that Keatson had had many visitors.

He looked closely at the walls, and tapped on a few of them, but could make out no hollow places or secret passages. There weren't any hooks or holes where recent pictures might have been ripped out, either. Harry always checked for those, since the case where everything would have been much easier if he'd known from the beginning that a portrait of the victim existed.

At last he turned to the desk, noticing that whoever had been through here last had arranged the papers neatly in stacks. One had a label pinned to the desk above it, saying "Legal Documents," but the others had none. Harry left the Legal Documents pile alone for now and dug into the largest of the unlabeled piles. He didn't want to intrude on the privacy of the Keatson family unless he had to.

Keatson apparently hated two things: consistency and people who had actual drawing talent. His pictures were made in strong, slashing lines, and Harry had to wince as he considered the lack of skill in them. Two figures appeared again and again, a man who looked enough like the corpse to be a self-rendering and a naked, kneeling, adoring woman.

Harry grimaced and pushed aside the top three drawings so that he could look at the one that was most detailed. He had already known that Keatson had unrealistic, exaggerated desires. Malfoy had said as much the first night Harry went to Corybantes.

_Malfoy._

Harry grimaced again. He had carefully kept the name out of his thoughts, because he knew he wasn't prepared to answer all the questions that arose when he didn't.

He still thought much the same about Corybantes that he had when he first went there. Most of the people who used it had distasteful fantasies. Harry wouldn't try to interfere in them, but he couldn't respect them, either.

But about Malfoy himself, he had strange reactions and plenty of questions and the uncomfortable suspicion that Malfoy wanted him—for no apparent reason that Harry knew of, because what did he have to offer someone who didn't need an Auror or a celebrity?—and…

And not much else.

It was simultaneously too much and not enough. Harry couldn't ignore his knowledge and he couldn't make a decision based on it.

He grunted at last and glanced down at the drawing again, since that was germane to the investigation he was actually conducting in the first place.

Keatson sat on a throne in the middle of what looked like a flowering field in spring, though the entire sketch was in black and white, and so Harry couldn't be sure. His face was stern. In front of him knelt a naked woman with her hands bound behind her, staring up at him with a quivering lip and huge tear-filled eyes. Two other women stood over her, one of them holding a whip and one a—muzzle? Harry had to bend his head sideways to look at it, and even then, he wasn't sure. He shuddered and looked at the background.

There was a strange shape there, drawn sideways and in flight, so that at first Harry thought he was looking at a bird. Either expectations adjusted his eyesight for him or his eyes adjusted themselves, because he suddenly saw it for what it was. A hurled knife, thrown by someone who stood outside the scene.

It was aimed straight at Keatson's throat.

Harry raised his eyebrows. _Are we dealing with a fetish, or with a suicide wish, or with a paranoid fantasy about someone trying to murder him?_

He put aside that drawing and looked through the rest, though he had to roll his eyes at the great majority of them. Women kneeling to Keatson, women looking up imploringly at Keatson, women sitting on Keatson's lap and wrapping their arms around his neck as they wept. Harry was glad that Malfoy hadn't offered him further details of the fantasies that the club's rooms enacted for Keatson. He'd need a long shower.

_And there's Malfoy in my head again, as real as if he never left._

Harry sighed in disgust and slammed down a drawing on the desk. One corner of the parchment bent, and the next moment he shook his head and felt silly. Why should he let stupid things like this upset him?

All it argued was that he needed greater control. Keatson was a victim. Harry's primary mission was to find out how he had died, and bring the murderer to justice if there was a murderer. He could think about his disgust when the case was done.

And that solution would have to apply to Malfoy, too. Maybe they could explore whatever hovered between them later, when the case was done. Harry didn't see any way that he could deal with them simultaneously, though.

He gathered up several of the most "interesting" drawings and went to ask Anna what was in the pile of legal documents. If there was something that clarified or explained the death, he thought he'd have heard about it already, but on the other hand, Keatson was estranged from his family. Maybe Harry would have to violate their privacy after all.

A realization stopped him as he glanced back once at that neat, beautiful room, which revealed so little of its owner's mental existence.

He wasn't sure that he _could _control himself and stop himself from reacting to Malfoy if he went back to Corybantes.

On the other hand, passing the case on to someone else, or stopping the investigation, would be nonsensical and disrespectful of Keatson as well as Kingsley, who had trusted Harry enough to assign him to it.

Harry went out the door still chewing on the problem.

*

Looking through Keatson's legal documents hadn't proven fruitful. He hadn't left anything complicated or convoluted in his will—and he had made a will, though one charmed not to be visible until one of the executors touched it. There was no quarreling over his tiny legacies. He hadn't made any strange final requests that might have shed light on the case in some way.

That looked to Harry like suicide. Not many people who weren't old left their legal affairs arranged so neatly, even if they meant to—and if they were people neat enough to do it genuinely, that usually showed up in either areas of their lives. Every area of Keatson's life argued for the opposite: overflowing, slapdash, or hidden.

Dirty.

Harry sighed and shook his head as he stepped out of the shower, rubbing his hair briskly with a towel. He shouldn't react like this when someone was dead and his fantasies had always been private and he had taken steps to ensure that he didn't hurt anyone else because of them, but Harry still felt slimy even now.

If Keatson had decided to commit suicide, then only two problems remained, or one depending on how they were looked at. There was the lack of a weapon, and the fact that Corybantes's fantasies couldn't cause lasting physical damage. On both accounts, Harry had Malfoy's assurance that it was impossible for Keatson to have hurt himself.

_Malfoy._

He would have to deal with Malfoy again in order to make progress on the case. There was absolutely no other choice.

"It's not even that I don't trust him," Harry muttered aloud as he wrapped the towel around his waist. It was his house, the place he could relax, and so he could talk aloud to himself if that was what he needed to solve the case. "It's that I don't trust myself."

"Harry? What are you talking about?"

Harry hastily whipped his wand up from the corner of the sink and Summoned the robes that were hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Ron had come through the Floo into the house—he had to have done it, since that was his voice—the way he sometimes did in the evening. Trust Harry's luck to mean that Ron had heard what he was saying.

_This is why I really can't relax or let my guard down, _Harry told himself as he pulled the collar of the robe over his head and cast a Drying Charm on his hair. _It's always going to hurt someone or confuse someone, even if I don't think it will._

"Just a minute, Ron," he said calmly, and stepped through the door, waving away the heated air that followed him. Ron, who was standing in the middle of the living room and staring at the books on Dark curses on Harry's shelves, turned around with a strained smile that Harry had got used to seeing lately.

"Hi, Harry." He ran his hand through his hair. "I came to ask you over for dinner this weekend. Hugo's been asking where his godfather went."

Harry sighed with relief. Ron hadn't been close enough to the door to overhear Harry's words, then, or he would have asked him what he meant at once. He had probably just heard Harry's voice and wondered what he was saying.

Ron mistook the sigh, and puffed up like a peacock who'd seen a rival. "If you don't want to come, you don't have to," he said stiffly.

Harry smiled at him. His friends were still the best part of his life, even if he'd lost touch with them somewhat. "No, I'd love to come," he said. "I was sighing at the thought of how long it'll be before the weekend." He rolled his eyes. "And then I don't even get to take time off those days, most of the time. Criminals never sleep."

Ron didn't smile back. "I don't understand why you don't quit the Aurors, Harry," he said, in a way that told Harry he must have been thinking about the words for a while. "You're always stressed. You're always tired. You barely have the time to spend with us." He was speaking more quickly and confidently as he went on, and looking Harry in the eye now. "You could do something else. You _know _you could. And since you've started talking about how dissatisfied you are sometimes, I know it's not that you love your job."

Harry let his smile fade, too, because he knew what kind of conversation this would be now. "Because I'm addicted to saving people," he said. "And because, most of the time, I can handle the stress."

Ron jumped and stared at him. "You mean—you _know _that you have an addiction to saving people?"

Harry raised an eyebrow. "I'd think it would be bloody obvious by now," he said dryly. "And I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent observer."

"But then, why don't you stop?" Ron asked the question as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

"Because it's a calling." Harry shrugged helplessly when Ron looked stubborn. "I complain, yeah, but everyone complains about their job. I'd be miserable away from it, like someone who's a good singer would be miserable not to sing anymore even when he doesn't feel like facing an audience. This is what I'm good at."

"You could find something else you're good at," Ron said.

"I could," Harry agreed, "but I know it wouldn't be Quidditch, because I'm too old now to play as well as most of the younger blokes." He ignored Ron's spluttering attempts to deny that. "And in the meantime, I'd sit around stewing, and wondering how the Department was getting on without me, and Kingsley would firecall and ask me to handle one small thing, and I'd be an Auror again before you know it."

"That's tyranny," Ron said earnestly.

Harry had to grin, though he tried to restrain it when he saw how hurt Ron looked. "No, it's not," he said. "Really, Ron. I have the right to choose my employment, and right now this is what I choose. It's an ordinary job in the end, or at least it causes me an ordinary amount of stress. Maybe that's not true for other people, but it is for me."

"But you never take a holiday," Ron said, in the tones of someone who'd been anticipating this exact conversation for a long time and still hated the way it was going. "You never relax. There are so many things that you won't tell us."

"And I've told you all the reasons for those." Harry paused in swiping at his hair—it seemed that the Drying Charm hadn't taken care of the two longest and wettest strands, something that happened to him frequently—and studied Ron curiously. "Do you not believe me?"

"You could tell us about the things you experience!" Ron snapped. "We tell you about our problems!"

"Yes, but those problems don't count murder," Harry said quietly.

Ron seemed to sag then. "If you're happy," he said, "I reckon that we can't complain. But I don't think you're happy, and neither does Hermione. That's the reason we bring it up so much."

Harry shook his head."I'm happy in different ways than other people." He didn't add that he hardly thought it could be otherwise, when so much of his life had been strange and abnormal. "I promise you, if Auror life ever becomes intolerable to me, I'll let you know, and then you can pull me away from it if I insist on staying."

Ron regarded him with wide eyes, then gave in and nodded when Harry went on smiling at him. "I suppose we have to trust that you know yourself," he said. Then he gave Harry a brief curious glance. "It is possible that you've forgotten how to relax?"

Harry laughed. "You don't forget how to do that, Ron. And just to prove it, I'll sit around with you tonight in the Leaky Cauldron and drink as much Firewhisky as you like."

Ron seemed satisfied, and started talking about the joke shop while Harry Summoned robes that were more appropriate for going out in public. But Harry, who knew himself, had been aware of how long it was before he could call up the breath to laugh, and the sudden jolt that Ron's perceptive words had given him.

_It's not just Keatson's fantasies I find so slimy. I think of my own fantasies and I shudder._

But there were other ways to relax than indulging your fantasies, and Harry found one that evening, when he came home with his cheeks aching from how hard he'd smiled.

*

"Malfoy."

Harry had not the slightest idea how to act after the revelations that Malfoy had made to him, so he kept his head up and his face calm and friendly as he nodded to the other man. He extended a sheaf of Keatson's drawings before Malfoy had time to do more than nod back. "Do these seem representative to you of the kinds of things Keatson desired?"

Malfoy took the papers and examined them without apparent surprise, though Harry wasn't sure if that was because he had seen them before or because he had expected something like them among Keatson's effects. Harry studied his hands, and didn't see them shake or pause in their turning over of the papers.

He _did _notice more about them than was comfortable, such as how slender the fingers were, before he focused his attention back on Malfoy's face. Malfoy was giving him a slow, pleased smile. Harry flushed. Yes, he'd been attracted before to people with slender hands, but he shouldn't be thinking about such things in the middle of a case.

"They're the kinds of scenarios that he regularly had his fantasies act out," Malfoy said quietly. "But generally, the ones that he used in the last few months had more and more violence directed towards himself, and not others." He turned one picture to face Harry. It was the one Harry had noted that seemed to have a flying knife in the background. Malfoy's tracing the figure with a finger showed that he'd seen it immediately. _Perceptive, _Harry thought, and remembered that he often thought perceptive people were attractive as well. "I don't think these are recent drawings. He might have hidden those."

Harry shifted and cleared his throat. "I'll look for them." He hesitated, and wondered if he _really _had to spend time on the questions that crowded his brain. He still needed to ask Malfoy about the fantasies and if it was really impossible to sneak a weapon in, after all.

But these questions were distracting him, so Harry thought it best to get them out of the way. "What are your fantasies about me?'

Malfoy took the change of subject without any apparent surprise. The heat deepened in his eyes—Harry realized suddenly it had always been there—and he leaned forwards, placing his hands on the desk between them. They were in Malfoy's office again, but this time the paperwork was gone. Malfoy had very little around him but bare wood and bare walls, Harry thought, as if he felt that the fantasy rooms should be ornate but not his rooms for business dealings. Harry could appreciate the mindset.

_Even if I don't want to._

"I want you," Malfoy said. "That's it, really. That simple. I want you because you've changed so much, now, from the way I knew you at Hogwarts. I want to see your face flush with anger again. I want to watch you fly. I want you to lean your head on my shoulder and confess all the weaknesses that you won't confess to anyone else. I want to trace the connections between the person you were and the person you've become."

Harry swallowed. The idea was so like his own musings on Malfoy the other evening, when he had tried to find the schoolboy in the mature man, that he couldn't speak.

Malfoy stood up again and said in a cheerful tone, "I believe I have found something that might interest you. Follow me?"

He turned away and sauntered off. Harry forced his legs to work so he could follow.

But in the meantime, his head hummed and kept humming. He had thought Malfoy's words would bury his curiosity, kill it with the same disgust that Harry felt when he thought of Keatson's fantasies. Instead, the images whirled through his mind and he wondered what it would be like to experience Malfoy's fantasies as the recipient of them.

He could feel something even more disquieting than curiosity or confusion making its presence known as he watched Malfoy striding in front of him, the confident, piston-like motions of his hips and the rounding of his arse.

Desire.


	6. Illusions and Allusions

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Illusions and Allusions _

Harry stared at the object on the table in front of him for several moments before shaking his head and saying, "I give up. What am I looking at?"

Malfoy gave him a secretive smile from the other side of the table. Harry only glanced at him once before lowering his eyes back to the object. It might be bewildering—it had a body made of red crystal with projecting silver spikes that curved into tiny bowls on the ends, like Pensieves—but it was easier to look at than Malfoy's smile. At least the object didn't inspire thoughts that Harry had no business having.

"This is the equivalent of one of our rooms," Malfoy murmured. Harry had the disconcerting feeling that Malfoy was looking at him instead of the object. He tried to ignore it. "We use it to screen our customers and make sure that they're not harboring plans against Corybantes or desires that would be truly dangerous for us to fulfill. As I've told you, the combination of magic we use is new and not perfect. It cannot do everything."

"That's the first time I've ever heard you admit that about something important to you," Harry muttered. He thought he could see a gleam of rising light in the center of the red globe. He squinted, and the gleam turned into a five-pointed star. Harry had no idea what _that _meant.

Malfoy's voice sharpened in the way that Harry had known it would. He grinned inwardly at the success of his ploy, not thinking that Malfoy would be able to detect the slight change in his face. People who dreamed, or fantasized, about Harry didn't know what his face _really _looked like most of the time. "I've changed my mind about more things than you know, Potter. The Dark Lord, for example."

Harry shrugged as if it didn't matter to him, as if he were sorry that he'd brought it up. In reality, he was relieved. He obviously couldn't ignore Malfoy and hold his composure perfectly the way he should have been able to after hundreds of cases. The next-best thing he could do was to substitute the relationship they had shared at Hogwarts for the uncomfortable mass of swirling emotions in his chest.

"So the device screens their fantasies," Harry said. "What does it have to do with the case? If you intend to use it on me, Malfoy, I think you should be prepared to die of boredom."

Malfoy paused. "Your fantasies could never be boring to _me_, Potter," he whispered.

His voice was odd. Harry didn't look up into his eyes because he knew he would only regret it. He examined the device again. "What does it have to do with the case?" he repeated, as if he hadn't heard Malfoy.

There were long, promising moments before Malfoy responded, moments that seemed to be filled with his silent struggle to get himself back under control. "This device contains some of Keatson's more recent fantasies," he said finally. "I thought you might want to see it."

Harry looked up then, because he would have had to possess an unviolated, quiet heart not to do so, and it was too late for that. "You've _had _this, and you only thought about telling me about it _now_?" he demanded.

"I didn't realize we still had it," Malfoy corrected. He was leaning against the wall, watching Harry with a small, triumphant smile that emphasized the redness of his lips far too much. "Usually, we destroy the star-globes after we make the decision to turn the client away or admit him to Corybantes. I kept Keatson's out of the vague sense that he might need professional help to separate his mental visions from waking reality—someday. But I put it away when none of his violent fantasies seemed to endanger his sanity, and I assumed that Leon had destroyed it."

"Who's Leon?" Harry circled to the other side of the globe, because he hoped that viewing it from a different angle might tell him how to use it. That the movement put more distance between him and Malfoy was merely incidental.

"One of my other employees," Malfoy responded. "I can call him in if you like."

"It seems awfully convenient that this would be the one star-globe spared, out of all of them," Harry muttered. His eyes searched the nearest side, and found no switch or incantation of any kind. _Damn._

"Nothing about this case has been _convenient_." Malfoy's voice turned brittle, snapping in Harry's ears like a chicken bone. Harry gave a small nod. Good. Maybe that was a sign that Malfoy was getting bored of him and wanted Harry out as much as Harry wanted to leave. "A great deal of it was forgetting and coincidence, I told you. It's possible that I mentioned something to Leon when I gave him the star-globe that made him decide to save it in case we ever needed it again. I repeat, should I call him in?"

Harry nodded. "Yeah. But after you show me the fantasies that are in the star-globe." He looked up at Malfoy, who simply stood there, staring at him, and raised one eyebrow. "Did you need help with what any of the words in that sentence mean?" he demanded.

Malfoy stepped around the table. His cheeks were flushed. Harry told himself that he should take some pride in spoiling Malfoy's appearance, and that that pride should diminish the apprehension he felt at seeing him come closer.

"I've tried to cooperate with you, Potter," Malfoy began, his voice full of quiet threats like arrows in a quiver. "I've tried to give you what you need to solve this case. And I've been far more open with you about my honest wishes than anyone else who has ever come into Corybantes. _Must _you insist on driving me away?"

"It's unprofessional," Harry said coolly. He dearly longed to point out all the ways Malfoy had _not _been helpful, but he decided that would be counterproductive. Malfoy wanted him to get emotional, to get angry, to let his guard down so that these bloody rooms of his could capture Harry's fantasies. Harry saw no need to let his mind be raped that way.

_Rape is an unnecessarily dramatic way of putting it, _he thought a moment later.

But everything else was still true, so he waited stoically, quietly, for Malfoy's response.

He could hear Malfoy's rushing breath as if he was standing next to the man in a void. Malfoy's face had turned red, and his head had tilted forwards as if he intended to stab Harry with his nose. Harry felt himself grow calmer and calmer. Malfoy seemed to be sucking all the anger out of the room. Given what lengths he had gone to to get Harry angry, Harry thought that was only fair.

"Professionalism means too much to you." Malfoy's hands had closed into fists, now, and he drummed one impatiently on the table next to him. Harry watched it carefully. He had seen people who seemed to make senseless gestures suddenly lash out before. "I can be professional. I can investigate my customers, and make sure that their fantasies cause no damage to themselves or other people. And yet I am friends with many of my clients, and I don't turn away in disgust from what I find in their minds. Is there no way for you to act like an Auror and yet be friendly towards me?"

"Not when I have reason to suspect that you're the murderer," Harry said. "Or perhaps hiding the murderer."

Strangely, those words seemed to make an impact on Malfoy. He stopped moving and considered Harry attentively, with his head cocked on one side. Then he swept a hand through his hair and nodded shortly. "I suspect this must seem rather alien to you," he said. "Someone who's so intense that he makes you feel threatened."

Harry kept the words he would have liked to speak about his feelings to himself, and nodded back instead. Malfoy pursed his lips.

"Someone who seems to have other interests at heart than clearing the reputation of his club," he said.

"I can understand that last part," Harry said. "You have wealthy patrons who would continue to come even if I could prove that Keatson died as a result of carelessness here. But an accusation sustained with evidence _would _scare some of your clients away. You must know that."

Malfoy might have stepped next door into another world and not heard Harry's most recent words. His eyes were slitted as though he were a large cat reclining in the sun.

"Someone," he murmured, his voice soft, "who seems interested in you, and not merely what you can do for them."

Harry frowned. This sounded like it was straying into personal territory again.

"I know it probably doesn't look like it," Malfoy said, stretching out one hand so that his fingers curled slightly at the ends. Harry glanced into his palm out of habit, but he wasn't holding a weapon. "But I'm _not _mad."

"I never said you were, sir." Harry instinctively used the defense that he called upon when Kingsley annoyed him, making his voice bland and soothing, while his eyes concentrated on a point above Malfoy's head.

Malfoy's face changed with extraordinary rapidity. He shook his head, and his leg twitched as if he would have liked to walk nearer, but he stayed where he was.

"You don't believe that," he said. "You feel overwhelmed. I understand. I would, too, if I came into what I thought would be an ordinary, if somewhat repulsive, case, and found out that the person who ran the establishment where the death happened had dreams about me."

Harry examined him attentively. Malfoy's voice was the slowest he had heard it, and the hectic flush in his cheeks had died away. No, he didn't look mad.

_Now, anyway, _Harry admitted to himself.

"There are things I still need to think about," Malfoy said. "Decisions I made that seemed good at the time, and now I think they were wrong. On the other hand, reversing them might not correct the wrong. It might make you respond worse than ever."

Harry stiffened to his full height and spoke as sternly as he could. "I wish you would stop thinking about what the effect on me might be, sir. It's solving the case that's important."

Malfoy's smile had a tinge of sadness to it this time. "No," he said. "You're wrong there. The effect on you is the most important thing, and, for me, always has been."

Harry closed his hands into fists and wished he could think of anything to say that would convince Malfoy they weren't destined lovers, or whatever strange conception he'd worked up in his head.

"_Now _you sound mad, sir," he managed.

Malfoy shook his head again. "You're only saying that," he said. "And I suspect that I haven't been able to alter my approach enough to make you sure about me. I always thought that the best thing to do if I finally got you into Corybantes would be to come on strong. I thought you would need to be seduced by overwhelming you until you could acknowledge your own need to give in to pleasure."

Harry held himself still, because a hasty response would be worse than the wrong one, and carefully probed around the insides of his Occlumency walls. No, they felt as firm as ever, which made him suspect that they hadn't fallen or permitted Malfoy a glimpse of his fantasies. Instead, Malfoy had probably either guessed already or just happened to hit on a quirk of wording that came near what Harry wanted in the most shameful part of himself.

"I was wrong," Malfoy said. "You need to be talked to and treated rationally, because you _are _rational. Repressed, yes." He gave Harry a sidelong amused look. "But rational. And you're too strong to treat like a conquest."

"I don't understand you at _all_," Harry began, his voice crackling with the tension. He no longer cared if Malfoy knew it. "I was brought here to investigate a case—"

"Yes," Malfoy said. "That had to occur when we knew the death had happened and what the inevitable consequence would be. But that's not all you were brought here for." He bowed to Harry and walked towards the door. "I'll summon Leon. In the meantime, enjoy the visions that Keatson placed with me." He waved his wand, and a whirlwind of sparks began to move in the star-globe.

Then he was out the door, and gone, and Harry had to clench his jaw against the temptation to shout. What the _fuck _was going on? Did Kingsley know about this? Did the patrons of Corybantes know that Malfoy considered toying with him more important than getting the club cleared of the imputation of crime so that they could return to their favorite decadent pursuits?

He wanted to shout and lash out. He wanted to do it so badly that he knew that was an excellent sign he _shouldn't _do it.

He ended up taking enough deep breaths to make him feel light-headed instead, and then he turned to investigate the star-globe. The fantasies were bright and insistent, if smaller than Pensieve visions, and he _had _to concentrate. He had to.

But based on what the visions showed him and what Malfoy's employee said, Harry hoped that he could make an arrest. Malfoy might be sane, but Harry wouldn't be for much longer if he stayed in Corybantes.

*

"You wished to speak to me, sir?"

Harry stared. Of course he knew that the name "Leon" could indicate a lion, and given the ways of Corybantes, that should have prepared him. But the man who stepped into the room had a flaring lion's mane around his face and lion's paws in place of feet. His fingers were tipped with delicate claws. His eyes were far too bright a green—though not, Harry thought with a touch of scorn for himself for noticing, as bright a green as the ones he saw in the mirror—and had pupils like a cat's.

"Yes," he said, and did his best to sound relaxed and not ungracious. Malfoy's employee didn't deserve to have Harry's ire at Malfoy taken out on him. "I understand that you happened to preserve the star-globe that belonged to Pascal Keatson." He nodded to the globe on the table, keeping his eyes away from it. The visions he had seen in it still sickened and haunted him. Keatson wished to know what it was like to feel death coming for him, bright and sharp, and his favorite idea about it was that a knife would cut his throat. After watching him die in endless permutations, Harry had no taste for more.

Leon nodded. "Lord Malfoy—"

"Why do you call him _lord_?" Harry demanded, turning sharply around. One never knew, he told himself. This might be important. Maybe Malfoy had fantasies of supreme power and control, the kind that would make him conceal information because he wanted to solve the case himself. Harry had met plenty of people over the years who were convinced they could play Auror, and some of them had managed to pretend well enough to convince others.

_You know that isn't the reason that you're asking the question, _his conscience said, in a clear voice that Harry hated. It was the same way it had spoken when he did something that endangered his partners because of pride and stupidity. _You want to understand Malfoy so that you can unsettle him, so that you can get to him the way he's getting to you._

Harry clenched his teeth down on his tongue until he tasted blood. The question had been asked, and Leon looked no more than mildly surprised by it. In fact, he smiled knowingly and nodded again.

"It takes a bit of getting used to, doesn't it, sir?" he asked softly. "Everything here is his. Under his control, produced from his mind, executed—or not—at his command. Some of our guests feel rather claustrophobic at first, convinced as they are that they should be able to command their own destinies."

"So that's why you call him lord?" Harry asked, to fix his attention on the words and away from how supremely creepy he found the results of Malfoy's control.

Leon grinned, showing teeth that had become points. _No surprise, _Harry thought. "Yes. It started out as a teasing remark from Shadow, because of the way that he ordered everyone around. But the rest of us liked it, and started adopting it." He cocked his head to the side and lifted a tail that Harry hadn't noticed properly before, since it seemed to spend most of its time coiled around Leon's legs. "It fits. He gives us what we most crave, and in return, we indulge his tiny caprices."

"What about his fantasies?" Harry asked. He was wondering if the subservience that Malfoy's employees exhibited, including the way that Shadow refused to talk to him about anything important in front of him, was meaningful. Perhaps most people here knew Malfoy had committed the murder, but they had gone so deep into the dark, hot labyrinths of Corybantes that they weren't able to see that they should report the death. Harry had dealt with situations like that before.

And been in them. He shuddered as he thought of the way he had acted during an undercover assignment to investigate a group of demon-worshippers. He had never been so near to becoming what he despised.

"Oh, no, sir," Leon said, sounding shocked. "He would never ask someone in the club to do something that intimate and personal."

Harry stared at him. "But this place is all about trusting someone else with your intimacies," he said.

Leon looked over his shoulder, then leaned confidingly towards Harry. "Well, sir," he whispered, "between you and me, Lord Malfoy is a bit of a hypocrite."

The richest, ripest snort of Harry's life tried to work its way out of his nose, and he had to suppress it. _A bit?_

"He encourages others to lower their barriers," Leon was continuing, with several wise nods that Harry thought made him resemble Hermione, "to bathe in the relaxation he offers, whether they want a literal bath or something as exotic as a group of dancing girls who are half-panther. The fantasy rooms must have been the centerpiece of your experience of the club so far, because that's where Keatson died, but there are plenty of other rooms here as well. Massage rooms, bathing rooms, bedrooms where our clients can sleep in the assurance that their rest will be undisturbed." He paused, with a faint, gentle smile on his lips. "Sometimes people come here who are parents and simply want to _sleep_, the way they can never do when they have young children around the house. We entertain the children so they don't need to worry at all."

Harry blinked several times. Trying to fit that imagined Corybantes into the one he had seen was impossible.

"But of course," Leon continued, waving one paw above his head to show off the seriousness of what he was discussing, "Lord Malfoy thinks differently. His fantasies are private. I don't think he's ever confessed them to anyone but Shadow, because she's been with him longest. And I reckon he'll confess them to the person who can fulfill them," Leon added, with a shrug of one tawny shoulder. "I suspect it's one single person he wants with a devouring desire, the kind that sometimes destroys our clients before we can fully ease them of the flames. But I don't know who it is."

Harry had to close his eyes and swallow slowly, because only now did he understand the full impact of Malfoy's admission in his office.

_I'm the one he wants._

So many emotions bent back on themselves in Harry that he didn't think he fully got to feel one before another intruded. There was wariness, and anger, and amazement, and concern for Malfoy's mental health.

But most of all, making sparks dance golden behind his eyelids the way squeezing them shut too hard did, was confusion.

_Why—why the fuck would he want me? Someone who understands the weaknesses desire unleashes as well as he does wouldn't succumb to mindless celebrity-worship. And he said something about knowing that I wasn't the same as I was at Hogwarts, so he can't want the schoolboy. But there's no way that he can know the real me, either._

Harry blinked and opened his eyes slowly. He had the impulse to seek out Malfoy now and speak to him, but the case was still the more important thing. He could do nothing as long as the fear that Malfoy was the murderer, or protecting the murderer, stood between them.

"We seem to have drifted a bit off-topic," he said, smiling at Leon. The man had a polite look on his face still, so Harry didn't know how much he might have guessed of the thoughts going through Harry's mind. Harry hoped he hadn't guessed much at all. "Why did you keep this star-globe?"

"Lord Malfoy is wonderfully cunning and clever," Leon answered at once, with a brush of one claw across his mane, "but not always _conscious._ He said that Keatson's fantasies worried him, but he couldn't understand why, since he had seen more violent ones before. Well, I watched the visions and I understood why at once. There was a desire to die there without any of the usual motives for it." He glanced at the star-globe. "You've watched them, sir?"

Harry winced, which Leon took for an answer. "He wanted to taste that special pain that comes on the brink of death. He didn't think about what would come after that, so it wasn't a wish to leave life behind. He didn't want to make people sorry he was gone. He didn't want to die because of some overwhelming sorrow in his life. It was—that taste of sensation. Nothing else." Leon looked at once solemn and disbelieving.

Harry curled his lip. "So you kept it because you thought that Malfoy would probably want to look at them again someday, in case something happened?"

Leon bobbed his head. "Yes, but I never anticipated something like this happening, sir. Lord Malfoy's protections are, as I said, all under his control. No one could have broken through his wards if he did not allow it."

Harry licked his lips. The evidence that Malfoy was complicit in the murder seemed stronger everywhere he looked.

But he had no idea how that fit with the evidence of Keatson's drawings and fantasies. Or the things Leon had told him. Or the fact that Keatson had been killed by someone facing him instead of from behind—although both positions had showed up among the visions he had just watched.

"Thank you," he said. "No further questions."

Leon bowed and retreated from the room. Harry bent his head and raked his fingers through his hair until he felt a bead of blood break from his scalp.

Malfoy had given him a gift. But was the gift poisoned, or meant to be a pure, sweet elixir? And even if Malfoy thought it was pure, did it still have poison hidden at the bottom of it?

Would he end up a sex slave if he listened more closely to Malfoy?

Then Harry laughed at himself, a short bark that sounded desperate.

_No, the inevitable will happen. Malfoy will find out that I'm nothing like he thought me, and give up in disgust and despair._

Harry strode out of the club. He knew his next step, but he could not be on the premises of Corybantes when he enacted it.

And all the while, he subjected himself to a scathing with mental steel for worrying more about disappointing Malfoy than whether Malfoy was the murderer.

_At least my priorities are in the right place, though. I need to be thinking about Malfoy and the other people who will be affected if the murder happened in Corybantes—including Keatson's family—and _not _myself. Who the fuck cares how Malfoy's fantasies affect me? He gave me the gift of his honesty under a mistake about who I really am. I just have to make sure not to drop it. There's no question of taking it into myself._

That final idea couldn't still the confusion whirling in him, but Harry made it serve as a stable point to fix his thoughts to, out of which he could grow his intentions.

And the first of those was sending an owl to Shadow, to ask her to meet him privately, and without Malfoy's knowledge.


	7. Answers and Asking

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—Answers and Asking_

"I'm not going to eat you."

Harry thought making that statement, especially with a slight smile, would calm Shadow down, but instead she only stared at him and then looked down at her wrists again, tracing the faint lines between the scales with her finger. Harry sighed and held out a cup of tea towards her. It was some time before she noticed it, but when she did, she nodded jerkily and took it with a murmur of thanks.

Harry stepped back from Shadow and sat down on the couch across the room. He would let her have as much space as she needed to make her decisions. She had multiple ones to make—whether to talk to him at all, and how much to tell him. Harry was confident that she knew more than one thing about why Malfoy was acting so strangely. Leon had said that she'd been with Malfoy since the beginning. She _must _know a lot.

_Maybe she even knows why Malfoy desires me so much, when there's no way that he can really know who I am._

Harry sipped his tea and waited. As he had thought would happen, the silence and the lack of pressure began to loosen Shadow's nerves. She took a deep breath and picked up the cup of tea, cradling it as she stared into the depths, now and then blowing across the surface. Harry waited for her to drink, but she didn't. Was the warmth enough comfort for her, he wondered, or was she afraid that he had put Veritaserum in it?

"I know that I have to tell you," Shadow said at last, lowly. "It's a betrayal of myself and my principles if I don't. But it's a betrayal of him if I do." She looked up, her face anguished. Harry was surprised how easy it was for him to read that from her, even with her gem eyes and strange teeth.

Harry sighed slowly. He hadn't expected this. Since Shadow had made an effort to tell him whatever she had to say twice before, he had assumed she would speak without hesitation when they were finally alone. But he reached out, because he had to, and held a hand towards her in the air, since she was too far away to touch at the moment. "You don't have to speak if you don't want to," he said.

"Yes, I do." Shadow bowed her head. "If it had always remained a secret, private between him and me, there would be no reason to tell you. But I knew the moment I saw you in Corybantes that it had gone too far."

_What went too far? _But Harry doubted that asking at the moment would do anything except make Shadow dither further. So he waited. The tea felt thick and heavy in his mouth when he sipped it again.

Shadow spoke in a whisper that Harry could hardly distinguish from his own breathing at first, but her voice swelled with power as she went on.

"I know that he used to wonder what it would be like to be your friend. When he went through the trials that he did after the war, that was one of a few fantasies he could feel any interest in. He clung to it. It obsessed him more than was healthy. I knew that the first time he told me about it, but I didn't think much of it then. I was obsessed with changing my appearance, too, and as long as neither of us hurt other people to get what we wanted, who cared?"

Harry nodded. He had plenty of sympathy for that view. His friends and Kingsley would make noise about taking holidays, but Harry's hard work solved cases and hurt no one. He had no idea why they were so interested in seeing him travel to some hotel and lie about doing nothing.

Shadow took a deep breath. "He came up with the idea for Corybantes. He founded it. He made it successful. It's far more than what you think it is, you know," she added abruptly. "It involves people who want to recover from wounds, and people who want to learn to know themselves, and people who want an encouraging environment because they've been abused all their lives. There's more than one entrance. There's more than one kind of fantasy room. Some of them are used exclusively to allow people to face their demons and their fears. It's—a loving environment."

"But that's not the one I was invited into," Harry said. "Malfoy invited me into the one that involves sex and darkness. Why?"

Shadow stared at him. "Because Keatson died there."

"I don't think," Harry said carefully, clenching his hand around his teacup and doing his best not to crack it, "that that's the only reason." He waited some moments, and Shadow kept up the steady stare. Harry grew tired of this, and added sharply, "Is it?"

Shadow jumped and flinched. Harry clenched his teeth and took a slow, steady breath. _I can get answers without hurting people, without frightening them. I know I can. I just have to remember that those answers might not come as quickly as I would like._

"No," Shadow whispered at last. "His fantasies changed, as he watched you through the newspapers and saw how busy you were. I think he expected at first that you would slow down someday—have the children and the wife and the perfect family life that your parents had and that everyone agreed you wanted. But as time passed and that didn't happen, he started talking more often about how hard you worked and how it wasn't right that you were all alone. 'I could help him, Shadow,' he said more than once. 'Who knows more about getting people to relax than I do?'"

Harry bared his teeth. "So that's what you wanted to tell me? That he wants to have sex with me? He implied as much himself, so I'm not sure why he made you keep it secret."

"He doesn't want to just have sex with you," Shadow said. "He would have made himself a false Harry Potter and fucked him if that was all he wanted." She leaned forwards. "He wants to ease your loneliness. He wants to teach you how to enjoy yourself and live a normal life, things he thinks you've forgotten. He wants to fulfill your fantasies. He wants to do for you what he wants to do for every client of Corybantes, but with a passionate, devouring desire that is eating him alive from the inside."

Harry found himself relaxing instead of tensing, which was the last thing he had expected given Shadow's news. He _understood, _though. Malfoy needed rescuing. Maybe it was from the pleasures he'd let swallow him instead of from criminals, but that didn't matter. Harry could act now in good conscience. He wasn't hurting Malfoy and opposing something he wanted; he was ultimately going to help him.

"You know that he can't really have what he wants," he said. "He doesn't know me. He doesn't have the slightest idea of what I might require of him, and that means that he could condemn himself or do something genuinely repugnant to his principles just because I might demand the impossible."

Shadow's hand reached towards him, her fingers trembling. "Haven't you paid attention to what I said?" she demanded. "That doesn't _matter _to him. He knows enough about you to think that you would never ask for anything repugnant. He wants to give you pleasure no matter what. The harder you are to please, the more he would like it."

"But that's mad," Harry said, baffled once again at the enigma that appeared to be Draco Malfoy.

Shadow's hand dropped as though someone had cut it off, and she nodded, her eyes fluttering with what looked like exhaustion. "Yes. _Now _you understand."

"So he is mad then?" Harry considered the way Malfoy's eyes had flashed when he made some of his statements, or the pleasure he seemed to take in holding information back from Harry. Harry never would have suspected the existence of the star-globe with Keatson's fantasies embedded in it if Malfoy hadn't told him about it. Harry wondered if someone could be sane in some circumstances and mad in others.

"Not _exactly_," Shadow said. "No more than I was when I longed to change my body and had no hopes of magic that would let me do it. No more than he was when he desired your friendship and thought he would never win it." She paused, then added, "No more than you are when you investigate crimes and desire to solve them."

Harry stared at her, baffled. "Being an Auror is hard work, not an indulgence," he said.

"I wonder," Shadow said, and gave him what Harry decided was supposed to be a wise look, though he had no idea why she had decided that he would fall for it.

"So you're worried about what Malfoy might do to fulfill these fantasies of his," Harry said. "I can understand that. And Malfoy prevented you from telling me this—why? Did he simply want the telling under his control?" It would explain why Malfoy had revealed his fantasies almost casually and in private.

Shadow shut her eyes. Her voice had descended into a whisper again, and Harry wondered if she was trying to protect her employer even now. "I'm worried about what he might do, yes. I'm worried about what he might have _already done._"

"You're worried that he killed Keatson," Harry said flatly. "Why? To lure me into the club? Could he be that short-sighted? He has to know that there's no way I would ever agree to fulfill the fantasies of a murderer, and he couldn't think that becoming one more criminal would mean anything special to me, when I've arrested so many of them."

His breath was coming short, he realized, and his eyes hurt as though he had rubbed sand in them. He didn't _want _Malfoy to be a murderer. The parts of him that made sense to Harry—the courage with which he had fought against his reputation after the war and chosen his job, for example—resonated with Harry, who had become an ordinary Auror instead of the Head Auror or the Quidditch player or the stay-at-home husband or the public speaker that so many people had thought he would.

"I don't think he killed him," Shadow said at once, too quickly. Or was it? Harry was so occupied with his own reactions that he knew he wasn't judging hers as clearly as he would like.

_That's been the problem from the start of this case. I'm occupied with what I'm doing, thinking, saying, when I should be thinking about what the potential suspects are doing, thinking, saying. _

At least the realization let him shake off his intense hopes and say, calmly, "Why is that? Did he have an alibi?"

Shadow nodded. "He spent that evening with me and Leon. Both of us will vouch for him. Both of us would be willing to swear to the truth under Veritaserum," she added, as if she had known the next question Harry would ask. "During the time Keatson must have died—sometime between nine and eleven—Lord Malfoy was with us, organizing the business of the club and discussing whether we should grant the petition of a woman with self-destructive fantasies to come to Corybantes."

Harry cocked his head. "I don't understand. If Malfoy didn't commit murder, what is it that you fear he might do to gain my attention?"

"Destroy himself," Shadow said. "Neglect his duties and let the club fail as a business, which he could never forgive himself for—once he noticed it." She hesitated, and a small, bitter smile crossed her mouth. "Expose his most vulnerable thoughts and feelings to someone who cares nothing for them, or him."

Harry blinked and then stared hard at her. "Now that I know there's actually some risk of that, I'm going to take care of him," he said. "Not try to destroy him. Not try to hurt him. I know a few people who do professional work with people who wrap them up in fantasies. Mind-Healers who are private and discreet and who've helped me out of more than one problem and have my permission to talk about those situations to Malfoy if you think that would help."

Shadow was silent for some moments. Then she said, "I fear that your trying to help him would be more likely to destroy him than your ignoring his advances."

"_Why_, for God's sake?" Harry flung himself to his feet and turned away to pace the room. He knew that he shouldn't be letting Shadow have this effect on him, but he couldn't help himself. No matter what he did, it seemed that people blamed him for not doing enough.

_Not relaxing enough, not solving the case fast enough, not being sympathetic enough to Malfoy, _he thought, pausing to run his fingers along the bricks above the hearth. Their roughness soothed him in a way that touching something soft wouldn't have. _I can't please them with ordinary efforts, but I try to do something extraordinary and then I have my friends and Kingsley—and now Malfoy—screaming at me about taking it easy. I don't understand._

"Because you are approaching this the way you would approach anyone else who needed your help," Shadow said. She stood up and moved to his side, which was so unexpected that Harry blinked and focused on her instead of the problems that crowded his head and which he dearly would have liked to think about. Shadow reached out and took his wrist in her hand, moving her fingers slowly across his skin. "And he wants special consideration from you. He wants to be unique in your life."

"What exactly what you suggest I do, then?" Harry snapped.

"I don't know."

Harry gave her a small smile. "At least that's more honest than I could expect from a lot of people."

Shadow watched him with those gleaming, unchanging eyes and didn't respond. Harry turned away from her and spent a few minutes pondering the lines in the wall. He had been in situations like this before, and he knew the first thing to get rid of was the crowding feeling of panic that was only closing in on him because he didn't have all the answers right away. He had time to make things right. It wasn't as though Malfoy was about to charge off a cliff this moment, especially because he had put his desires out there and Harry had rejected them.

Harry closed his eyes and immersed himself in the considerations of what had to be done. He had to find Keatson's murderer or prove suicide and close the case, of course. He had to show some kind of proof to Kingsley and the customers of Corybantes that would satisfy them. He had to keep Malfoy from destroying himself because he had built up this precarious fantasy world where Harry was his—

What? Harry shook his head. Master, or friend, or puppet, it really didn't matter, because Shadow seemed to think that any conclusion he came to could be dangerous enough to wound Malfoy mortally.

"Would you agree to submit to questioning under Veritaserum?" Harry asked, opening his eyes and turning back towards Shadow. "And what about Leon? There are certain questions I need to ask so that I can rule out possibilities about Keatson's death, and even though I might trust what you're telling me, my superiors won't without proof."

Shadow said, "It would depend on how you would use that information. If it was against Lord Malfoy, then—"

"If he committed the murder," Harry said, with the quietest but most forceful tone he could use, "then he should be in St. Mungo's."

Shadow glanced sideways at him.

"From the way you describe him, he does sound mad," Harry continued, gaining confidence. He couldn't believe that he hadn't thought of this solution before now. Malfoy committing the murder wasn't the end of the world, because there was a large chance that it wasn't his fault. He had probably been pushed towards madness by his unfulfilled desire for Harry, in the way that Shadow had hinted, and that meant it was Harry's duty to cure him. "I wouldn't arrest him for something like that. I would make sure that he got the treatment he needed."

Shadow watched him in silence for some time, then gave a slow nod. "Yes. All right. But Leon and I, even under Veritaserum, will only tell you the same things I have already told you. We were both with Lord Malfoy all evening, and he did not commit the murder."

"It's more for my superiors than anything else," Harry assured her again, finding room on his face for a smile. "They won't believe you without the evidence. I'm willing to."

Shadow nodded again. "All right."

*

Kingsley frowned. "I don't see how this testimony implicates Malfoy," he said, studying the Pensieve memories of the conversation with Shadow that Harry had placed in front of him. "All it means if she's telling the truth is that Malfoy _didn't _commit the murder, and that doesn't tell us who did."

"It frees me from a suspicion that's been distracting me," Harry said frankly, gathering the Pensieve memory so that it would coil back into his head. "And that means that I can pursue my course with a clear conscience."

"Of course," Kingsley said. Then he leaned back in his chair and watched Harry with that thoughtful air that meant he was going to say something more, something else. Harry sat on the edge of his seat and waited. He was good at looking both alert and patient, so that it wouldn't seem as though he was pushing Kingsley to reveal the information before he was ready.

"I've come to some conclusions that I didn't want to come to," Kingsley began, "having watched you perform on this case."

"Sir?" Harry asked uneasily. He wondered if Kingsley had extra reasons to be suspicious of Malfoy, or of Shadow for that matter, that he had managed to pick up from Harry's reports but which Harry had ignored.

"You're losing control of your emotions," Kingsley said, with that devastating gentleness that he used when he had told Harry that all the other Aurors were refusing to partner him. "You're getting too personally involved in this case. I think it would be better to pull you off it."

Harry lowered his eyes to the floor. He hadn't been pulled off a case since he started working alone. He was the miracle Auror, the one the Ministry called in when all the others had gone wrong or were likely to run into trouble. For him to fail now would probably be the beginning of the end. Kingsley would be asking him to retire soon.

But if he acted angry or upset about it, Kingsley would only use that as more evidence that _of course _he was doing the right thing. Instead, Harry held his breath for a moment and then asked calmly, "What makes you think I'm losing my head, sir? I can feel sorry for the victim and yet not be personally involved."

"It's not the victim I'm worried about," Kingsley said. "I'm perfectly satisfied that you're preserving the proper distance from Keatson and not letting your sympathy for his family overwhelm you. Malfoy is the problem, Harry. And I think you know it, so I'll ask you not to play stupid with me."

Harry stared up at Kingsley. His face was set in harsh, uncompromising lines. Harry licked his lips. Most of the time, he didn't try to change Kingsley's mind. He either agreed with him and stopped whatever he was doing that had caused Kingsley to disapprove, or he acted on his own and found evidence so convincing that Kingsley had to agree with _him_.

This time, though, Harry knew of no way to conceal his participation in the case at Corybantes. He had no reason to go there for his own pleasure, and no friends who worked in the club that he could contact under the pretense of associating with them rather than investigating.

"May I ask why, sir?" he repeated, when enough time had passed that he didn't think the repetition would annoy Kingsley.

Kingsley leaned forwards. He was rubbing his right thumb along the back of his left hand, and his voice and eyes were soft and kind.

"How long has it been since you looked in the mirror, Harry?" he asked.

"Yesterday after I got out of the shower, sir." Harry frowned. Usually he knew where Kingsley's metaphors or comparisons were going, but not this time.

Kingsley stood up and came around the desk. Harry rose to his feet. He should have been perfectly at ease sitting down while Kingsley stood over him, but not this time.

Kingsley reached out and shook his shoulder. "I've watched you turn into a brilliant Auror these last few years," he said. "You're driven. You're intelligent. You can obey the rules when you want, and work within them, and yet arrest the criminals who most need arresting. And you had professionalism I honestly never thought you capable of when you were still an adolescent and I was watching you in action."

"All of those sound like reasons for keeping me on the case, not taking me away," Harry had to say.

Kingsley pinched a furrow of skin on his forehead with his free hand, but never took the other from Harry's shoulder. "It's gone too far," he said. "You've transformed yourself until I don't think that any of that adolescent is left. There should be _something _left, Harry. I appreciate your brilliance, but you need to relax once in a while. I'm putting you on holiday, starting today. I knew at some point your composure would start to crack and you would need that holiday, but I put it off and put it off, telling myself we could use your help on just one more case and I'd send you home with orders to rest after that. It didn't happen, of course. Things you put off that long almost never do. So I'm making sure it happens now. Go home. Relax. Buy a Muggle telly and watch it. Take your godson shopping. Do whatever you need to make yourself a functioning human being again."

Harry shut his eyes, arranged his teeth in a straight line, and took a breath that made him feel as if his ears would burst. Then he said, "How long should I keep away from work, sir?"

"Six weeks," Kingsley said.

Harry's eyes flew open, and he started to repeat the words incredulously, but Kingsley continued as if he had anticipated no interruption, "I'll make sure the leave is paid, of course. For all the work you've done, I could do no less."

"But I'm not—" Harry started. Kingsley's implacable face stopped him. He stretched his hand out imploringly. "Sir, without the job I'm not _anything_. Give me a few more days, and I'm sure that I can find the murderer."

"It has nothing to do with your not finding the murderer so far," Kingsley said. "It has to do with me wanting to save your life and sanity. If you'd listened to the words you spoke just now, you'd know that. Go home."

"But—"

"Harry."

It was impossible to argue with that voice, but Harry still tried an appealing look that foundered on the rock of Kingsley's mild, steady stare back. Harry turned and marched out of the office, his cloak whipping behind him.

He even managed to stride calmly out of the Ministry, looking all the while as if he had somewhere important to go.

He waited until he had Apparated home to put his head in his hands and have a fit of the tremors.

_What the fuck am I supposed to do, if I'm not working on a case? Kingsley thinks he's saving my life, but what is my life apart from my work? He's letting his concern for me override the case that needs to be solved, and in the end, that's what will harm both me and the case._

_And how the fuck am I supposed to help Malfoy now?_


	8. Movements and Revelations

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—Movements and Revelations_

Harry couldn't allow himself to sit around brooding for long. There were too many reasons against it, he thought grimly as he began to throw everything he thought he would need for a private investigation into an Expanding and Shrinking Sack that he could put into a pocket.

First, Kingsley would tell Ron and Hermione that he had sacked Harry soon, and they would come over and try to act upset for him—while really watching over him to make sure that he took one of those precious "holidays" they made so much noise about. Harry might not have the chance to resume the investigation of Corybantes at all if he didn't do it soon.

Second, Malfoy would hear about the change in Aurors and bar the club to Harry. No matter what his obsession with Harry might be, he wouldn't feel it as strongly without Harry right there in front of him to remind him about it. No, he would work with the other Auror, who would be someone more rule-bound and less discreet. God knew how someone else's blundering might upset Keatson's murderer. Perhaps he would be threatened by it as he hadn't been by the way that Harry chose to look into things.

And third, if Harry slowed down too much, for too long, he would start to think there was some truth in what Kingsley was saying.

Harry took a deep breath and clenched his hand into a fist. He knew he had promised Kingsley and his friends to take a holiday sometime in the future, but couldn't they see that it was ridiculous to ask him to do that in the middle of a case? He had to _solve _this first, to see Keatson's murderer tucked away comfortably in a Ministry holding cell or find incontrovertible evidence of suicide.

He _had _to. It was what he was made for, born for.

Harry knew, even as the words ran through his head, how other people would see them. They would look at him with pity and tell him that he was as obsessed as Malfoy, just with different things. They would smile at him and try to escort him to St. Mungo's, the place where Malfoy and maybe Keatson's murderer ought to go.

But Harry had a job to finish. No one called anyone else crazy when they worked hard at their jobs. Like Hermione, for example. She sometimes spent more time on legal cases than Harry did on investigations. Why didn't people think _she _was mad?

_Because she's not you, _Harry thought, as he dropped the pile of Keatson's drawings into the sack and pulled it tight. _Because she didn't come through a 'damaging' childhood. She fought in the war the same as I did, but it doesn't come back to that for anyone else. They think the war affected me differently than anyone else. They think I couldn't deal with the death of my first partner. They think I'm so fragile._

_Well, I'm not, and if I manage to solve this case even though Kingsley's sacked me, maybe they'll finally see that. _

Harry yanked again on the sack, and finally realized it _was _shut. He sealed it with the spell, watched it shrink, and then tucked it into his pocket and turned towards the door.

As he did, the fireplace flared. Harry jerked to a stop with a curse. He was sure he had remembered to shut the Floo connection, but it seemed that he hadn't.

"Mate?" Ron's voice called. "I know you're there. We have a few things to talk to you about." His voice was filled with the gentleness Harry dreaded, the gentleness that said he couldn't be trusted to make up his own mind or know what was best for him.

Harry ducked silently through his house to the door and took one more look around from the entrance to make sure that he hadn't forgotten anything. No. He had all the potions and the spellbooks he could think of tucked into the sack already, and he had his wand and a set of robes that weren't Auror robes but could pass for it in uncertain light, like the kind that filled Corybantes most of the time.

Shite, he just needed his wand most of the time. He was a powerful wizard, though most of the time Kingsley and his friends seemed to want to forget that.

"Mate?" Ron called again. Then he muttered something to Hermione, and the next moment, Harry heard the _puff _of displaced soot that meant Ron had come through the fireplace and was standing in his drawing room.

Harry pulled open the door and ducked out again. He felt sorry for his friends. He knew this would cause an argument that would be hard to repair.

But he _had _to do this.

*

Harry leaned against the red brick front of the Veterans' Rehabilitation Center in Roof Alley and exhaled slowly. He had decided it was time to make a thorough reconnaissance of Corybantes, so that he would know where all the entrances of the building were and as many other secrets as he was capable of spotting from outside.

He was not at all prepared for what he had found.

He had assumed, without even thinking about it, that the entrance from Knockturn Alley and Roof Alley was the main one. It was the one Malfoy had told him to come to. Only now did Harry realize that Malfoy had probably done that, at least in part, to manipulate his perceptions. On other sides of the building, the scene he encountered could not be more different.

The entrance from Roof Alley resembled a gate into paradise, or at least the kind of paradise Harry remembered from Aunt Petunia's pastel depictions of it on the walls. Stone pillars framed the gate, which was wound with vines and large, drooping flowers. Visible through the gate itself was a shimmering, level plain of green grass, dotted with cool, quiet ponds and scattered trees. The trees all had golden fruit shining through their leaves like small suns.

Harry squinted at it doubtfully. He didn't think the gardens could be real; among other things, Corybantes occupied too small a space to contain all those trees and pools. And sure enough, when he focused his eyes just right in the way that Auror training had taught him, the illusion shimmered and vanished.

But the real entrance was still big, and he could see children playing quietly in one room down the corridor with the door half-open, and half a large, brilliant chamber with many windows where people with bent limbs and smoking heads—recovering from curses, Harry thought—circled weights around their heads or moved in synchronized patterns probably meant as physical therapy.

It all seemed so normal, Harry thought, half-incredulous. So…_unthreatening. _He knew, from what Leon had said, that Corybantes provided other services than just sex, but he wouldn't have thought this was the same place at all if he didn't know the location.

Which face was the real one?

Well, he doubted that he could learn that without actually venturing into Corybantes.

Harry reached into his pocket, pulled out the sack, and retrieved one of the waiting flasks of Polyjuice Potion. Not many people knew he had this, but Adela had been willing to brew it for him after he fetched some rare ingredients for her. Now Harry slipped in the hair of a witch who lived in a rural part of France and whom he'd helped several cases ago, and then drank it down, gagging. It still tasted horrible, and then he had to remain still as the twitches and ripples raced through him, altering his face and form into those of the French witch. The Disillusionment Charm he had cast on himself before he drank the potion at least prevented people from looking in his direction, however.

When he felt his face settle, Harry dropped the Charm and walked openly towards the shimmering entrance of Corybantes. He stepped up the first stairs and felt the softness of grass beneath his feet for a moment before someone moved to greet him. Harry shook his head in amazement. This was a wondrously complete illusion.

"Greetings, madam," said the employee who bowed to him, a woman with the head of a greyhound and long wings spreading from her shoulders. Her mouth seemed to fall naturally into a smile, and Harry could see why they had chosen her to welcome newcomers. "I do not think you have been here before. What is your name and what are you looking for?"

Harry's voice had a faint French accent to it, but he had expected that and didn't let it rattle him. "My name is Marie Perrin," he whispered, "and my mind, it is tattered and torn. I am looking for _complete _peace and quiet."

The woman took his arm with a gentle hand and pulled him further into the club. "Of course, madam," she said, and her voice had become warm and soothing. Harry might have relaxed into it, even knowing all he did, if he hadn't kept his mind sharply focused on the case. "We can accommodate you. Come, tell me of your troubles. What have you suffered, and what remedy do you seek?"

Harry launched into his prepared story of a husband dying and a fortune collapsing, as well as the grief of losing kin in the war with Voldemort, while he looked carefully around the club. Behind the sumptuous illusions were stone walls, but, like the walls of Hogwarts, they were softened by tapestries and carvings that looked ancient. The light of the torches itself seemed soft, more filled with shadows than Harry thought it should be with the way the sconces were arranged. They walked on carpet gentler than the imaginary grass had been, and the woman guided him into a room with pale blue walls and windows that looked out on still more extensive, if equally enchanted, gardens. Harry felt a pulse of longing run through him. Yes, a place like this would be the place where he could relax.

He caught his wandering thoughts and stung himself with the whip of his own scorn. He had come _prepared _for the club's seductions, and he was still falling into them. That just pointed to the fact that he should get Malfoy out of trouble and find the murderer as soon as possible. The longer he spent around Corybantes, the worse he became.

"My name is Cecile, Madam Perrin," the woman said then, bringing Harry's attention back to her. "I think we shall be able to fulfill your fantasies quite comfortably. However, every new client has an interview with the owner of the club first, so that he can ascertain if he can serve them." _And so he can make sure their fantasies aren't dangerous, _Harry thought. "Please allow me to fetch him."

Harry gave a regal nod. "Of course, dear."

"In the meantime," Cecile said, turning and taking a silver tray from a slot in the wall where it seemed to simply appear, "please refresh yourself with a cordial. You look as if you've traveled a long way and you could use it." She held out a crystalline glass to Harry, filled with a sparkling red drink.

Harry took the drink and smiled at her, but one sniff told him that the cordial contained a Calming Draught and a mild potion, which Adela Pole called the Babbler's Delight, that would make him freely confess everything that crossed his mind. It was not Veritaserum, since it did not separate truth from lies, but it lowered the inhibitions in a similar way. Harry sat holding the cordial until Cecile left the room, then quietly Vanished the drink and lowered the glass to the table beside him.

He frowned, not sure what to think. So far, he had seen nothing suspicious in this side of the club, and he suspected that the employees and clients who came _here _had very little to do with the darker, wilder side where Keatson had perished. He wondered how different Malfoy's behavior would be when he saw him.

He soon had a chance to find out. Malfoy came in with a rapid stride, which made Harry think for a moment that he was eager to be done with the tiresome old woman Marie Perrin seemed to be as soon as possible. Then Harry saw his eyes, and the look of eager curiosity in them, and the dignified way Malfoy leaned down to grasp his hand and kiss the back of it.

_He's interested in his clients, in all of them, _Harry had time to think. _He looks calm and collected and ready to help me—_

Then Malfoy's lips touched his skin, and Harry's coherent thoughts vanished in the middle of a storm of ice. He couldn't seem to stop shivering, and his mind drowned under the pressure of imagining what else those lips could be doing, how they could lay him down and ravish him if that was what Malfoy wanted. Harry shut his eyes and tried to diminish the light sheen of sweat on his brow.

Malfoy had seen it, if the slow way that he released Harry's hand was any indication. "Madam Perrin," he said, in a softer and more cheerful voice than he had ever used to talk to Harry in his own form. When Harry opened his eyes, he saw that Malfoy had pulled up one of the other chairs close to his couch and sat in it with his hands folded and his legs crossed, giving him a slow, serious, thoughtful gaze. "You have special needs, don't you? You require more than the simple rooms and unbroken rest that you told Cecile about."

"If I simply wanted _unbroken rest, _then I could go to St. Mungo's," Harry said tartly, striving to keep his mind on what he was doing. He hated the way he had reacted to Malfoy. It was something to be grateful to the Polyjuice for, though. As a woman, the signs of his arousal were much less noticeable. He folded his hands in his lap in imitation of Malfoy and stared steadily at him. "Yes, I want something else."

"Will you share your fantasies with me?" Malfoy's voice was a gentle, warm invitation. No doubt he expected "Madam Perrin" to simply break down and babble everything she had ever desired.

Meeting Malfoy's eyes and seeing the warm depths of empathy there—this time, his only desire seemed to be to reach out to another human being—caused a second storm to overpower Harry. This one was of regret and longing, hitting him as keenly as sleet. He would never be able to confide in Malfoy the way his clients were invited to, even if he, miracle of miracles, managed to locate Keatson's murderer and persuade Malfoy to accompany him to St. Mungo's.

He couldn't do it because it was against his nature. Harry couldn't let someone—_anyone_—else that deeply and freely into his mind. It would mean talking about the things he dreamed of when his mind was defenseless, hazed with the potions that the Healers had given him to make him sleep or with exhaustion, and he dreamed exactly as if he was like everyone else and capable of behaving normally.

It wouldn't work. He knew that he would watch Malfoy's interest shrivel up and die if he confessed his ordinary, petty feelings and wishes. Or, worse, Malfoy would lean near with that interest and then—

Then Harry would have to trust Malfoy not to betray him, not to mock and laugh at the stupid little things he wanted. It was like trusting someone to reach into his chest and put their hands on his beating heart. Sure, they hadn't squeezed down and crushed it _yet_, but they might at any time in the future.

Malfoy would probably take it as some special personal insult if he knew what Harry was thinking, but he shouldn't. There was no one Harry trusted enough to lose control of himself in front of. Confessing his fantasies were just one more way of losing control.

"Madam Perrin?"

Harry swallowed and brought his eyes back to Malfoy's. He realized that Malfoy was watching him with gentle, implacable patience, waiting for _some _kind of answer, and that Harry should have given one long since.

Except that he could barely remember the question. Except that the thought of the answers he had prepared for this disguise faded before the thought of his own urgent wishes, none of which would ever be gratified. That fact made Harry feel small and pathetic and infinitely sad, even as he tried to wrestle his mind back into the need to confront Malfoy head-on.

That had been the problem from the beginning of this case, he thought. He would never have left some decisions as long as he had were he treating it like any ordinary case. He would have investigated Keatson's effects straight off, and noticed the drawings. He wouldn't have fixed on Shadow as the sole suspect, and felt so disconcerted when the "clue" of her scale turned out to mean nothing. He would have talked to the clients whose pseudonyms Malfoy had given him, something he still hadn't done. He would have—

Malfoy's voice hissed as he spoke something, a word or two words in a spiky language that Harry didn't know. The next moment, Harry felt as though someone had dumped scalding water on him. He sprang to his feet, whipping out his wand.

Thick liquid dripped off him, too heavy and full of odd mixtures of green and brown and red for scalding water. Harry spluttered and closed his eyes as it slipped past his face, then looked up at Malfoy.

Malfoy was leaning forwards, his lips parted, and his eyes so wide and dark that Harry seemed to see a bottomless pit behind them.

"Harry," he breathed.

Harry's hand flew to his face. Yes, the scar was on his forehead again, and his hair was wild and tangled. As strange as it seemed, this room apparently had a spell on it that enabled Malfoy to remove Polyjuice Potion when he wanted to.

Malfoy shook his head twice, as if dazed, then leaned back in his chair and gave Harry a bright, appraising glance. The bottomless pit had disappeared, at least for the moment. But he knew better than to think it had vanished altogether. Harry swallowed painfully. He had come here to talk to Malfoy in disguise so that he could see how Malfoy behaved when he didn't know it was Harry. All he had done, instead, was throw Malfoy back into that obsessive mindset.

He had hurt him again, and that he hadn't meant to was meaningless. He'd done it.

"Malfoy, I'm sorry," he started.

"So you should be, for sneaking in like that," Malfoy replied calmly. "Cecile will be distressed when I tell her that our latest client decided not to take advantage of all we could offer after all." He leaned towards Harry as if pulled forwards by a wire and added, "Did you really believe that Shacklebolt assigning a new Auror to the case would make any difference to me? I've told you why I want you, and it's not as an Auror."

Harry could feel temptation tugging at him like a thick river. He could ask what Malfoy meant, or deny what he'd said and force him into a more passionate declaration. Either would mean that Harry became involved in the conversation, thinking once again of what _he _desired and deserved and couldn't afford to lose.

None of that would help Malfoy. None of it would let him think about Malfoy in the way that he knew he needed to think after his conversation with Shadow.

"I didn't come here to continue the investigation," he said. Malfoy arched an eyebrow, his face and features taking on a subtle brightness that Harry knew he had to counteract before it could assume a definite form. "I mean, not exclusively," he correct himself. "I've considered your behavior more closely, and—well, I think you need the help of the Mind-Healers at St. Mungo's."

He'd expected a hysterical denial. Malfoy studied him in silence for a moment, and, once, took a deep breath as if he'd considered shouting at Harry. Then he asked, "Why?"

"Look at the contrast between your behavior with me and your behavior with any other client," Harry said, gesturing between them as if that would let him summon back the Malfoy who had come in calm and sane and balanced, focused on the business of the club and what Madam Perrin could add to it. "You _change _when you're around me. You become unbalanced. You think of fulfilling my tiniest whim, and that's not healthy. You should care more for yourself and for Corybantes as a business."

"I think I know who has been telling tales," Malfoy murmured, a thick amusement in the back of his voice. Harry opened his mouth to defend Shadow, and Malfoy plunged into the opening as smoothly as a shark into a school of fish. "In reality, I have been thinking more of myself than of you."

Harry hesitated, staring at him. Had things changed that much in the day since he'd last seen Malfoy? It wasn't impossible, he had to acknowledge. Some of his cases had evolved that fast. He managed a smile and said in the most encouraging tone he could use, "Really? What have you been thinking about?"

Malfoy rose to his feet and considered him—from a distance. He didn't _need _to stalk closer, Harry thought in irritation. The sense of his presence pressed against Harry, shoved at him, and would probably have sent him sprawling if Malfoy had tried a little harder.

"I've thought about you, and the way I want to fulfill your fantasies," Malfoy said. "Fulfilling your fantasies would add to the pleasure for me, Harry. It's not the only source of pleasure, because I desperately want to fuck you." Harry flushed and tried to ignore the way that it seemed Malfoy's presence had grown heavier and hotter still. "But having you trust me means still more." He folded his arms and nodded a little, as if he thought that should settle all of Harry's questions.

"But what about Corybantes?" Harry demanded. "You can't fuck me night and day and expect it to sustain itself as a business."

A shadow passed across Malfoy's face, but the smile that twisted his mouth was rueful, not bitter. "Leon already talked to me about that," he said. "He pointed out the mistakes in the records since Keatson's death. I haven't been paying the kind of attention that I should to Corybantes. I will in the future, with Leon working at my side for the next few days to keep my focus where it should be .But when I'm not working on that, I see no reason I shouldn't do as I like. You're the one who thinks a job should occupy your entire life." He paused, and his face shifted into a hungry expression Harry could have done without seeing. "But of course, since you're on holiday now, that's not true for you, either."

"I think you need to be in St. Mungo's," Harry said, clawing his way back to a position from which he could speak to Malfoy as a superior. "Let me help you."

"I think you need to be in my bedroom," Malfoy said, and gave him another hungry look, which made Harry's body tingle and his head ache. He _wanted _to be desired that way, but it was wrong for it to actually happen. "But not as a client of Corybantes. That won't work. I'm not interested in you accepting my business, not right away. That can come later. I'm interested in you accepting me second, and yourself first."

Harry clenched his fists in frustration. This had all failed, because he wasn't clever enough to keep Malfoy from suspecting something.

"This should be about you," he said. "Not me."

"I told you the reason why it was about me," Malfoy replied calmly, as if he had a point. "And you're wrong, as it happens. It should be about both of us." He paused and studied Harry, then added, "But it can't be until you give in and accept your fantasies."

Harry saw nothing for it but to walk past him and leave the club. Malfoy let him, only pivoting in place to watch him go. Harry could feel those eyes between his shoulder blades like the touch of a warm palm.

His mind filled with images again, and he was tempted to turn around and simply lay all his fears, all his insecurities, at Malfoy's feet.

Then he shook his head and continued walking, head down as if he was plodding against a strong wind. He was feeling weak, and thinking about _himself _again. There were so many better things to think about.

And he would find a way to fix his mind on them before he returned to Corybantes.


	9. Edges and Precipices

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—Edges and Precipices_

Harry sat in a chair near his hearth with his hands pressed against his face. He wouldn't have risked coming back to his house, except that it was unlikely they would look for him here when they had thoroughly searched it once already.

Besides, he had dismantled the alarm wards Ron and Hermione had left strung across the door and windows that would have let them know he was entering.

The chair was still. Harry concentrated on that, and the stillness of the house in general, the comfortable way the chair molded to his bottom, and the solid weight of the fireplace across from him.

The thought of the way the house, and everything else on the planet, was whirling along through space at thousands of miles an hour tried to intrude. Harry shuddered and banished it. He needed immovable things around him right now.

Because the center of his brain was one enormous whirling confusion.

_What—what, how, what the fuck—_

He couldn't believe how badly that had gone. He had been infiltrating buildings in Polyjuice disguises since the earliest days of his training. It was simple. It was effective. He could vanish into another person for short periods of time, all he required to be to talk to someone else and get the information he needed, even though he was no actor. It all depended on listening to what his instructors told him and then plotting out reasonable behaviors and plausible lies for his new persona.

Malfoy had walked into the room, and he hadn't behaved as though he recognized Harry at first, because there was nothing of Harry there for him to recognize. Even when he became suspicious and summoned the potion or spell or whatever it was that would dismiss the Polyjuice, Harry thought he hadn't expected to find Harry underneath Madam Perrin, just someone trying to enter Corybantes illegally.

How had he _known_? What had Harry done?

The answer was swift and cruel. Since he left Corybantes, more than confusion seemed to have entered Harry's mind; there was an iron desire not to spare himself, and to confront his mistakes so that they wouldn't happen again.

_You know what it was. You sat there staring at him like an idiot when he asked a question, instead of answering at once like the straightforward and fussy Madam Perrin would have. He had reason to suspect that something was wrong. Here's a woman who demanded complete rest and quiet immediately, even when speaking to someone who wasn't the owner of Corybantes, and then she can't ask for it when she has the actual chance to get it?_

Harry groaned and drew his hands down over his face. He felt shaky and feverish, though he didn't know if the sickly heat that seemed to be pounding through his head was real or not. He licked his lips and found them dry. He lowered his hands and looked towards the kitchen, thinking he should get some water.

But he didn't move. The whirling in his head had invaded his limbs now. He didn't know what would happen if he tried to stand up.

His merciless conviction of himself continued.

_You've handled this case wrong from the beginning. You've pursued strange suspicions and listened to Malfoy far more than you needed to. And why? This isn't a more violent murder than many you've seen. You didn't know Keatson. You want to give peace to his family, but you haven't done what was most effective for getting that accomplished, either._

_And why? _

_And why?_

Harry couldn't flee from the question any longer. He gave up the answer with a groan, as if it had been tortured from him. In fact, he found his hand moving to a scar on his shoulder inflicted by such torture during one of his cases before the words of the answer echoed through his head.

_Because he's the only person I've met in a long time who might be able to give me what I want, things I could never ask of Ron or Hermione or Kingsley. He sees fantasies fulfilled every day. He wouldn't back away from mine._

_And then it turned out that he wanted me _back_, and I was thrown into confusion because I knew that he wouldn't see me as one more person with strange fantasies to present, he would see me as a disappointingly flawed version of the Harry Potter he'd imagined, and I had to back away and try to become part of the case again, the perfect Auror, but I couldn't—_

Harry shook his head and forced his eyes open. Yes, he had been stupid, but at least he understood the reason for his behavior now.

However, he was dismayed at himself. He had thought he had the fantasies under control, so far from the surface of his mind that most of his dreams didn't even contain them anymore. How had they escaped and begun to obsess him so much?

_Your weakness. It was nothing Malfoy did. It was simply your weakness. The same thing that got you in trouble during the cult case, when you almost fell in with them. The same thing that got Roberts killed. The same thing that always opens up a chink in your armor, these stupid fucking emotions that you can't suppress._

Harry sighed. One of his instructors during his training had told him that, in his opinion, Harry was "too Gryffindor" to make a good Auror. Harry had dismissed that as mindless prejudice because the instructor had been a Slytherin himself, and anyway, what did the Houses matter beyond Hogwarts? They only got to determine seven years of your life, not the rest of it.

Now, he thought he knew what Bluegill had meant.

Something knocked against one of his windows. Harry sat up immediately, dizzy with the way his heart pounded. If Ron or Hermione had found him already, or if that was a note from Kingsley telling him he had to go to St. Mungo's—

But no. It was an owl, yes, but an unfamiliar white one with blue edges to some of its feathers. Harry stood up in wary curiosity and approached it. When he opened the window, the owl flew through it but simply landed on a table and extended its leg with the message. Harry cast several charms before he touched the parchment, looking for the spells that would make it Dark or turn it into a Portkey. None of those were present and, at last, he unrolled it and looked at it for himself.

The message shimmered when he looked at it, strange colors chasing over some of the letters. Harry blinked. He must be more tired than he thought.

_Dearest Harry,_

_This is magic of the kind that was first perfected in the fantasy rooms of Corybantes. Be assured, though, that everything it shows you is in fact real. If you don't believe me, then you can come to Corybantes again and I'll be happy to show you the memories in a Pensieve. For the moment, though, I don't believe that I could lure you near me, and I rather want to keep the memories in case this doesn't convince you and you never return._

_I want you. With time it could mature into love. Please believe me._

_Draco._

Harry, frowning mightily, had just reached the signature and begun to wonder what he meant by magic when the colors collected in a pinwheel of blue, red, and green around the signature. Harry reached for his wand, but found his body had gone still and lax. Then his mind seemed to _leap _out of his skull and dive into the pool of color forming on the page.

His last thought before he fell into the mental world the magic was creating for him was that at least Malfoy knew how to do his villainy with style.

*

Harry caught his breath and looked around. It felt as though he'd had a far more abrupt "fall" into the memory than he usually did with a Pensieve, but the only difference he could immediately see was that he seemed to be fixed in one place.

He recognized it after a moment. He was near the entrance to Corybantes that for so long he had thought was the only one, in an alcove that faced the dark central space. Harry knew from the shadows the torches threw that it meant he could see without being seen.

Malfoy was beside him. He took a deep breath as though he were about to jump off a cliff and arranged his cloak carefully, then strode out into the corridor. Harry followed him, wondering if he was going to see Keatson's murder without much hoping for it.

Instead, he watched himself come through the entrance and pause, contemplating the alcoves and the sign in the middle of the ceiling for a brief time before Shadow approached him.

Harry frowned. He had _felt _strong when he started into Corybantes, hadn't he? After all, he didn't know then how much confusion and tangled mystery would await him. He had anticipated a fairly straightforward case, with only his dislike of Malfoy to cloud the prospect. He should have looked cool and confident, his gaze expressing disdain.

Instead, he looked—half-wild. Uncomfortable. The way he craned his head back to look up at the sign and the way he stared at the murals would have made Harry think someone else who did it was plotting a crime here. And then he twitched when Shadow spoke to him and responded to her with his eyes fixed on her face and his hand clutching his wand the whole time. Harry searched his memory helplessly and couldn't recover the nervousness that it seemed his past self was feeling.

More than the emotions themselves, he was dismayed that he had revealed them so easily to other people.

It was even worse when Malfoy stepped forwards and they had their conversation. The Harry Potter of the memory, whom Harry was reluctant to admit was himself, seemed to spend the entire time looking away or meeting Malfoy's eyes with an expression equal parts hungry and lost. He _licked his lips _when Malfoy made a small motion to brush the hair out of his eyes. He looked at Malfoy's hair, his cheeks, the lines of his wrists and collarbone, and his arse when he turned around too much.

Harry could understand, now, why Malfoy and the Corybantes employees might not have taken him seriously when he denied that he had a need to express his fantasies. Despite his Auror robes, he seemed to want the services of the club, to be there only for that.

The image blurred, and Harry found himself confronting Malfoy in that moment when Malfoy had pinned him against the wall. The Harry Potter of the memory had eyes that were on fire and a mouth hanging loose and slack.

Harry shuddered. Well, yes, being pinned like that came close to some of his fantasies. But why was he _exposing _himself? He knew what he wanted was abnormal and irrelevant to the case.

He hadn't thought he was pushing it into people's faces like that.

Malfoy caressed his arm as he withdrew his hand. Harry didn't remember that, or the way his pictured self shut his eyes and shuddered. Or the look of hopeless longing that he sent after Malfoy when Malfoy moved to the other side of the room.

_Yes, all right, _Harry thought as the images blurred a second time. _I can accept what it must _look _like. But how do I make him realize that I didn't really feel those things? That it's simply a case of unfortunate expressions and a context where Malfoy has almost no choice but to interpret them that way?_

_I can't really feel those things. I didn't._

The next moment Malfoy had chosen to send him was the one where the Polyjuice had melted away. Harry leaned forwards, because he was intent on learning the trick so that he could counter it if it happened again.

In the end, there was no trick. Malfoy made a slight gesture with one hand that Harry hadn't noticed before, and spoke those spiky words at the same time. The ceiling above Harry shimmered and collapsed in a rush of stone that melted into blue sparks. When the blue sparks touched Harry, then the Polyjuice melted away from him.

And left behind desperation.

Harry knew that he _had _been feeling confused and upset and disoriented in those moments. He hadn't realized what it looked like from the outside. Harry gazed into his own eyes and saw someone who was falling apart. It was no surprise that Malfoy's face softened. He even half-stretched a hand towards the Harry in the memory, as if he wanted to pull him away from drowning.

Harry hadn't noticed that compassionate gesture. He had noticed only the hunger that Malfoy stared at him with a minute later. But did he only do that because he knew it was what Harry would expect from him? Because he knew that Harry would deny that he was in danger or suffering at all, and that Malfoy was the one who could help him, instead of Harry helping Malfoy to find a Mind-Healer?

Harry watched his remembered self stumble through the rest of the conversation and had to fight to keep watching. It was all so very _embarrassing. _He had thought he was controlled; he wasn't. He had thought that he would look like an apostle of calmness and the good that St. Mungo's could do.

He didn't. He looked like a madman. And when he dared to watch Malfoy instead, he saw the flickering little glances that Malfoy darted at him out of the corners of his eyes. He wondered if Harry was well enough to continue the conversation, that was plain. He pitied him and wanted to intervene, but he knew that Harry wouldn't accept his intervention. He was visibly coming up with a plan. Harry had seen that expression on other people's faces enough to recognize it now no matter how inscrutable he thought Malfoy was.

_I'm the one who needs help. I'm the one who's showing my deepest wounds off to everyone around me without realizing it._

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and squeezed his temples with his hands as the last memory dissolved. His breathing was rushed and painful, and the minute he started to accept that idea of himself, his mind spun and leaped and came to a new conclusion.

_Malfoy must have tampered with the memories in some way. He _must _have. There's no way that I could have looked like that. I've had too much experience controlling myself and being an Auror. I'm better than that. I must be._

_I refuse to believe him._

And then his mind turned again and arched like a shooting star back to his original thoughts.

_He saw what I was feeling. He saw what was true even if I never meant to show it. The way he reached out to me is an indication of that. I can't measure the way I affect people any longer. I can't stand on my own any longer._

Harry shuddered. A gasping sob rose through him, and then forced its way out of his throat as a harsh, gagging cry of fury and remorse and pain and helplessness.

_I'm falling, and no one will catch me._

The world seemed to spin the way it had when he was tumbling through the memories. When he came back to some sort of consciousness, he was lying on the floor, though he didn't remember how he'd got there, and the world still pivoted slowly around him, hazed with anger and pain.

_I don't have time for this!_

But the sensation of falling took over again, and Harry realized, dimly and dismally, that his mind and body were in fact making time for this, making room for a breakdown.

He closed his eyes, though it seemed to make little difference whether they were open or shut. Perhaps he would feel more comfortable if he did so. His breathing sped up again, and Harry felt one hand rising, his fingers curling into hooks, as though he would claw the answers to his questions from inside his head.

Then arms surrounded him and held his hand down at his side. The voice Harry least wanted to hear at that moment said into his ear, "I thought this might happen. I'm here, Harry. I won't leave you alone."

Harry tried to sit up. The person who held him leaned back enough to let him do so, but continued cradling him, and the most Harry managed to accomplish was to lean against his chest. Harry noted dimly that the white owl was gone.

_Of course the git would be an Animagus. _Harry took advantage of the brief breath of clarity he was drawing at the moment and shoved at the arms encircling him. "Let me go, Malfoy. I don't need your help."

The lie withered on his lips when Malfoy kissed the back of his neck. Harry shut his eyes, and trembled, and hated himself. It had been a long time since he felt a gesture like that, yes, but that was no reason to let it undo him.

"So stubborn, even to the end," Malfoy murmured. "No one should have to experience such a revelation alone, Harry. I won't force my attentions on you, but I must insist that you let me help."

"I don't _need _help." Harry listened to the echo of his words and wondered if they sounded proud and independent, the way he meant them to, or churlish and sullen. Malfoy gave a patient sigh, and Harry was afraid that he had his answer.

"Yes, you do," Malfoy said. "Either you've locked yourself back into denial or you're finally realizing what the rest of the world has known for years: that you're driving yourself dangerously close to the edge of collapse." He pulled, and Harry tried to use the pull to stand and shove himself away from Malfoy at the same time. His body didn't cooperate, so Malfoy put him gently on the couch and sat down next to him.

"Pretend I'm not here if that's what it takes." Malfoy wrapped an arm around Harry's neck and pulled him close, so that Harry's head leaned on his shoulder.

"How can I, when you're sitting like that?" Harry could feel his arms shaking. He'd hoped that he would get control of his behavior around Malfoy, but, of course, his body and mind seemed determined to defy him. He thought again of the way he had walked into Corybantes, the needs he had immediately betrayed, and choked.

_I don't know what I'm showing the people around me anymore. I don't know what I've kept to myself and what other people know. What happens if Malfoy can already guess some of my deepest secrets? He didn't show me his memories of everything. If he learned—if he guessed—_

Harry tried frantically to pull away, but Malfoy held him still and murmured into his ear, "You need someone here. I'm here."

"I need to be _alone_," Harry said, but his voice broke at the end. Thought after thought of all the things he could no longer do if he didn't have control of his facial expression crowded into his head, suffocating him. Investigate criminals, track Dark wizards, interrogate witnesses who couldn't realize why the questions were important, do undercover work, use spells that were meant to pass undetected…

"This is the end of my _life_," he said.

"Of the end of your life as you knew it, yes." Malfoy pulled him closer again, until Harry's face rested against his shoulder in warmth and darkness. "But that life was unhealthy, and close to mad. The moment you came into contact with someone you thought could help you, you appealed for that help. Some part of you is still sane, Harry, and determined to escape that repression you've enforced on yourself."

Harry shook his head. His eyes burned. His hands wanted to shove Malfoy away from him, but he had no strength anymore. His head wanted to stay where he was. His mind divided, warring against itself. This was intolerable, but so was trying to continue on as he had been, when he might lose command of his expression at any instant.

"Are your fantasies so repugnant?" Malfoy whispered. He stroked Harry's hair with a constant, regular motion. "Do you think I would turn away from you if I knew what they were? That's the look I saw in your eyes sometimes. Self-loathing. You hate so much of yourself, Harry, and you don't deserve that hatred."

"Yes, that's exactly it," Harry said, grateful to grasp the excuse. The two halves of his mind united for long enough to let him speak. "My fantasies are _stupid_, Malfoy. They're ugly and wretched, but even more than that, they're petty. You would despise me for having them."

"If you care nothing for my opinion, that ought not to be such a terrible fate." Malfoy's voice was absolutely calm.

"I don't want _anyone _seeing them!" Harry snapped. "I don't want to _look_ at them! I hate them! I hate so many things about what I want, about what I believe, about what I do and can't keep myself from doing, about what I am—"

His ears caught up with his brain then, and he shut his mouth.

"Ah," Malfoy said. "Yes. I thought so. And even you ought to be able to admit, Harry, that you don't deserve that level of loathing, after all the good you've done."

Harry swallowed. He couldn't speak.

"I wasn't sure, at first," Malfoy murmured, voice as soft and abstracted as if he was speaking to himself. "Sometimes you could recover your balance for a time, and I thought I might have been mistaken. And when I took the lowering of your inhibitions for conscious encouragement and tried to show you the force of desire _I _felt, all I did was scare you away. And then sometimes you seemed exactly like the prat I had known back in Hogwarts, determined to deny and sneer at me for nothing more than pursuing my ambitions, so I had to leave you alone to control my temper. It took me several days to see how those might be facets of a single being."

His hand moved down to cup the back of Harry's neck, and he whispered, voice more direct this time, "Why do you hate yourself, Harry?"

"Because—because—" Harry still hadn't planned on talking, but once again part of his mind and his mouth had acted without the command of his conscious will. "Because I ought to be able to do the right thing without faltering. And I can't. I ought to be strong and independent and take care of other people, not need to be taken care of myself. And I can't."

"I wondered how many of your fantasies involved that." Malfoy's voice deepened and warmed. "I _want _to take care of you, Harry. Fulfilling your fantasies means fulfilling mine. And if you want to wait, if you want to go to St. Mungo's first or if you need some time apart from me, then that's fine. Just as long as we can meet and talk some time in the future."

Harry shuddered, and Malfoy sighed. "I'm being greedy and urging you too fast again," he said. "For now, you need some time to think about what you just learned." His voice altered to a gentle, coaxing tone. "For now, rest."

Harry didn't think he could do such a thing. He hadn't realized he was carrying that much resentment against himself around, and now that it was past the barriers and he couldn't forget what he'd said, he wanted to remain awake and consider it. Build new barriers, maybe.

But the soothing, continuous motion of Malfoy's hand on his hair and the back of his neck, and the words he murmured with pauses of two heartbeats in between, made Harry close his eyes and succumb to sleep.

His hazy thought before he drifted off was that he couldn't remember the last time he had gone to sleep in someone else's arms.


	10. Conversations and Recoveries

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—Conversations and Recoveries_

Harry woke so slowly that at first he couldn't distinguish the dream from the reality. He had dreamed of lying on something soft, with warm arms around him. He would have been content to stay in that world for longer than his mind wanted him to. It was close to some of the fantasies he'd had, close to some of the gentler dreams, and he knew he wouldn't find anything like that in the real world.

But when he did finally open his eyes and focus blearily on the wall opposite him, he found that the soft thing had accompanied him. He ran his hand over blankets that someone had Transfigured and blinked. The spring that usually pressed into his back was gone. The pillows behind his head felt more yielding, too.

And though there were no warm arms wrapped around him, there was a warm hand resting on his shoulder.

Harry turned his head, shivering. The hand ended an arm, and the arm extended up to a body, and the body turned out to belong to Draco Malfoy, who was sitting in a chair next to his bed. Harry thought dazedly that he looked too fresh to have been sitting in the chair all night. Maybe he'd had monitoring charms that alerted him when Harry moved. Harry stared at him and said nothing. The remembrance of what had happened between them last night dried most of the saliva in his throat.

"Hullo," Malfoy said quietly. "I hope that you feel well enough to sit up and eat a sandwich. Do you?"

"I thought toast was more traditional for breakfast." Harry could hardly keep track of what he was saying. The words simply seemed to tumble out of his mouth.

"So it would be," Malfoy said, his voice warmer now, "but seeing as it's nearly noon, I thought you might prefer to have lunch instead."

Harry winced and struggled to sit up. Even though he'd remembered that Kingsley had sacked him and so he didn't have to be to work on time, he still found the thought of lying around while other people were up and about disturbing. Too self-indulgent. And when he was self-indulgent, bad things happened.

"You didn't have to make me lunch," he muttered, looking down at his hands. More and more memories struck him every moment, burning like cinders. He flinched when he recalled that he'd shed at least a few tears on Malfoy's shoulder.

He knew he had to repair the barriers that had held him away from the rest of the world, because there was no way that he could live with this sickening vulnerability. He just didn't know _how _to repair them.

Malfoy placed a hand beneath Harry's chin and tilted his head up. Harry stiffened in shock as Malfoy slipped his glasses over his face. It hadn't occurred to him that Malfoy would touch him like that. Comforting and soothing was one thing, but the hands that helped him out of bed now felt…authoritative.

Harry swallowed down his completely inappropriate reaction and tried to stand on his own. His body wasn't really weak, he thought, just groggy from his long sleep. "You didn't have to make me lunch," he repeated, because he hadn't seen or heard any response from Malfoy the last time he said it.

"I know that," Malfoy said. His voice was too close to Harry's ear, but if he noticed the shiver that sped down Harry's body, he was much too polite to mention it. "I did it because it's my pleasure. I know that you'll need some time to recover and decide what to do with yourself, and I won't pressure you to fulfill the rest of my fantasies right now. But helping you, advising you if I can, making sure that you don't slip back into the automatic responses that you showed before…yes, that will please me."

"But you don't _have _to," was all Harry could think of to say. Most of his attention was taken up with the fact that it sounded as if Malfoy wouldn't let him become the person that he needed to become again.

Malfoy simply shook his head and then urged him into one of his kitchen chairs. Harry sat down in self-defense and reached for the sandwich that Malfoy handed him. Biting into it nearly choked him, there was so much cheese and ham and pickles piled on it. Harry licked his lips to get rid of some of the juice and gave Malfoy a glance that he knew he was incredulous. He didn't care. If Malfoy had killed Keatson with strange magic, obviously he didn't mind trying more mundane means on Harry.

Malfoy frowned. "Don't you like it? I assumed that you liked all these ingredients since you had them here, but perhaps I was wrong." He looked thoughtful. "I don't know that much about making things from scratch, since the house-elves do so much for me. For you, I'd be willing to try, but that doesn't mean my first effort was any good."

The thoughtful look and the near-apology—as well as the implication that Malfoy could admit his own mistakes—made Harry feel as if he'd fallen straight back into the surreal mood from last night. He took a smaller bite of the sandwich, chewed a few times to work it down his throat, and then laid the sandwich back on the plate. "I appreciate it, Malfoy," he said. "The sandwich is fine. But I think that you need to go back to your club now, and I need to go back to my investigation."

For long moments, Malfoy did nothing but survey him. Harry felt a flush mount his cheeks. Did he have more pickle juice on his face?

But he knew it came from a deeper source than that. No one _needed _to look at him that intensely, with an expression that said he cared about the smallest things Harry did and experienced. He wanted it to happen, but that was one more selfish desire that could be stuffed under the surface and ignored.

The moment he got past the…fall that had happened to him last night.

"Listen, Malfoy," he said, and ate another bite of the sandwich. "I appreciate that you were there for me. I needed someone who was." Malfoy gave him a smile that Harry had to look away from. "But you're right that I don't trust you enough to let you into my mind and start describing all my faults to you."

"That's far from the first time you've acted as if you're horribly twisted and wrong for having fantasies," Malfoy said, his voice less tense than Harry would have expected. "Why? I know that you're disgusted by Corybantes, but you seem to be harsher on yourself than on people who want to experience sex with their mirror image or have a dozen people kneeling to them and worshipping them."

"Those people are…ordinary," Harry said, after a long struggle that he hoped would let him find a better word. Nothing came to mind. "Not Aurors with lives depending on what they do during their cases. I don't mind if they want to indulge themselves, as long as I don't have to watch it."

"But why is it wrong or disgusting to indulge fantasies in the first place?" Malfoy's chair creaked as he leaned forwards. Harry still refused to look at him, but he could tell what he was doing. "That's what I want to know."

"It shows that you've lost control," Harry said. He was fumbling for words again, but how could he help it? After all, he had said that he didn't want to trust Malfoy with his secrets, and he couldn't explain his reluctance without explaining the cases he had been involved in, the cases that had taught him to hate the corruption most people carried around in the depths of their minds. He thought a moment, and then smiled. Maybe Malfoy would understand this comparison. After all, even in Corybantes people seemed to perform their most sexual acts in private rooms, not in the entrance hall.

"It's like masturbating in public," he said, looking at Malfoy triumphantly. "You wouldn't want to watch someone doing that, would you?"

Malfoy's eyes widened, his pupils dilating. "For me," he said, voice deep, "it would depend entirely on who was doing the wanking."

Harry caught a glimpse of what he thought Malfoy was thinking—not because he was good at Legilimency, just because it was clearly written all over his face. He had some idea about Harry masturbating. He probably thought Harry did it wildly, jerking himself with quick and painful motions, his head tilted back and one hand clapped over his mouth to stifle his moans—

Harry turned away again, his face painfully flushed.

"But that's what it's like for me," he mumbled, though he had little hope that Malfoy would pay attention to him. "I don't want other people to see me masturbate, and I don't want to walk in on them doing it. It's so _private. _Why would you want someone else to see you doing that? I don't—I don't get that."

Malfoy said nothing for long minutes. Harry continued eating the sandwich. Once again, as had happened last night when he said that he hated himself, his words were echoing in his mind, and he thought of the many ways that Malfoy could take them. None of them were ways that Harry wanted them to be taken. It would probably sound like he was a prude or repressed, and that wasn't true.

_Lovers probably watch each other wanking all the time._

Harry shook his head and reached for the next sandwich Malfoy had made, a much smaller one with corned beef on it. His jaws were grateful that they wouldn't have to stretch around another huge gulp of food, he thought wryly.

"Harry." Malfoy spoke quietly. Harry grunted to show that he was listening, but didn't turn to look at him. "I meant what I said. I want you to have the time and space away from me to work these things out if you need to. At the same time, I'm not sure that anyone else would have the zeal to dig under the layers of deception that you're setting up to safeguard yourself."

Harry whipped around then, and winced as a piece of corned beef flew away from a bitten corner of the sandwich and hit Malfoy's face. Malfoy wiped it off with a napkin. Harry whispered, "Sorry." Then he remembered why he had turned around in the first place, and snapped, "I'm not lying."

"Not consciously," Malfoy said. "I know that. And your lies are good enough that someone else, like a Mind-Healer, might be fooled by them. They're certainly good enough to fool _you_. But do you remember what you said last night? You hate yourself." His voice fell to a whisper that Harry inched towards him to listen for. When Harry realized what he had done, he was disgusted with himself, but Malfoy's words captured his attention again. "That's not normal. You can feel disgusted by other people's public display of sexuality without having any problems with your own, but it's all too clear that you _do_. And with your ability and right to indulge in pleasure in general. I think some of your fantasies aren't sexual, but you feel just as uncomfortable with them, don't you?"

Harry shut his eyes. Malfoy's words had got into his head, and rattled around the center of his skull. No matter how many different explanations he thought of to put Malfoy off and challenge his interpretations, he knew that none of them would convince someone determined to disbelieve them.

More than that, Harry no longer thought that he could believe those explanations himself.

He swallowed. _No. No, I really think that the shameless indulgence I see from so many people is disgusting._

But was self-loathing really a sane response to that?

"I don't want to answer that," he said, and his voice snapped and rasped like a claw along stone. "I don't have to answer that."

"No, you don't," Malfoy said quietly, and then stood. Harry opened his eyes and watched him from behind his last sandwich as Malfoy went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. When it looked as if he was making himself soup, Harry sat up, frowning. After the resignation in Malfoy's voice, he had thought the git would leave.

"If you know that I won't talk to you about this," he asked, "then why don't you go back to Corybantes? I'm sure there are clients there who need you." He clamped his mouth shut the moment he had spoken the last words, because they came out with shocking bitterness, and he didn't want to think of why.

"My employees know how to handle Corybantes in my absence," Malfoy said. He was smiling as he cast a Warming Charm on the soup, and then a charm that Harry didn't know but which seemed to stir it at high speed. "I think Shadow was rather relieved, actually. She doesn't want me in Corybantes trying to attend to clients and decide whether certain dangerous people should be allowed in when she knows that I'm stewing about you."

"But you could leave for other reasons," Harry said, thrown off again. "I won't give you what you want, so there's no reason for you to stay."

Malfoy paused for a moment, though all he had been doing was leaning on the counter and watching as the invisible spoon of his magic sped around and around the bowl of soup. Then he looked up and straight at Harry. Harry shuddered back from what he saw in his eyes and dropped his gaze to the table.

"Would you say something like that to your friends?" Malfoy asked. Harry both longed and dreaded to hear a sneer in his voice, because of what it would mean, but Malfoy sounded gentle and tragic and tired. "Would you assume that _anyone _who wanted to share your life and help you would only do so as long as you would gratify them?"

Harry swallowed around a tongue that felt too large. Even suggesting something like that was unfair and disloyal to Ron and Hermione. He knew it. But they were friends from Hogwarts, and anyone he'd made friends with more recently seemed unlikely to stay with him just because he needed help.

_But why? _his inconvenient curiosity, which Malfoy seemed to have stimulated, asked a moment later. _Why should the friends you made at Hogwarts and the friends you made later in your life be so different? You know that there's no rational reason for that difference._

Harry leaned back in his chair and took a long, careful breath. He felt as if he was about to fall apart again. The pieces of his brain trembled _in _his brain. He would lose control of them if he moved. He had to sit still.

"Harry? Are you all right?" Malfoy came up behind him, soft-footed so that Harry didn't hear him until it was too late to hide the expression on his face, and laid his hand on Harry's shoulder.

Harry caught his breath, and knew it was on the edge of tears. He turned around, intending to get up and flee to his bedroom.

Malfoy caught him and steered him back into the chair. Harry put his hands over his face. Malfoy didn't try to remove them, but shoved his own chair close and sat there with his arms around Harry. Harry took slow, deep breaths, furious with himself for collapsing twice in twenty-four hours.

And for _no good reason. _Malfoy wasn't threatening him; Harry even half-believed him when he claimed that he didn't want to force Harry to talk. He'd made lunch for him and stayed with Harry during the night. Harry knew better than to think there was anything diabolical or inhuman in all that. Malfoy might still have diabolical _motives_, but they weren't coming out in his actions.

Yet Harry sat there, on the edge of breaking down, trembling as though someone had tortured him—yes, it was like the Dreisenberg and Coli cases—his defenses breaking, his mind on the verge of shattering, his sensibilities punished.

Hating himself.

Harry knew the answer, then, and he stopped shaking to consider it. Malfoy only moved closer, his voice a formless murmur as he wrapped his arm around Harry's shoulders. Harry was too involved in the thought of what was happening to him to resent the gesture, and he leaned on Malfoy's shoulder before he thought about it.

The thoughts in his head were too large to leave room for anything else.

Malfoy was _right_. Hating himself for having fantasies and emotions and lacking superhuman control wasn't a normal response, and it was a stupid one. Harry had felt that last night; now he was thinking through it rationally.

He hated what was happening to him, but the easiest way to face it was to go through it instead of trying to ignore it, because it just threatened his control again when he ignored it. He could face it, and trample through it, and beat it down, and _stop letting himself react this way._

If he acknowledged that Malfoy was right, and that he was sick and tired of chastising himself for mistakes that weren't mistakes to anyone else.

Harry shivered. The hard part was that he would need to trust someone else with his fantasies if he was going to do this. He didn't need to _do_ them, but he needed to at least _discuss _them. And that would mean giving the other person a chance to laugh at him.

Talking to Malfoy might actually be an advantage, though. He had _probably _seen worse fantasies. Looking at his desires as he clearly could with his reluctance still in the way, Harry had to admit that what he wanted wasn't so unusual or strange or repulsive.

_Maybe. It would depend on what he says._

One thing was sure: Harry would rather talk to Malfoy, who ran a club and was used to negotiating with his clients over how to fulfill fantasies that might hurt them or someone else, than he would a Mind-Healer. And talking to Ron and Hermione about things like this was impossible if he ever wanted to look them in the eye again. Harry cleared his throat and shifted his head, hoping that Malfoy would let him up.

He did. He watched Harry with the same gentle eyes and smile as before. Harry stared back and saw the sharp glint under the surface of those eyes for the first time. Malfoy was concerned about him, but he was trying hard not to show it more than he already had. Harry wondered if that was delicacy or common sense. After all, Harry hadn't exactly acted grateful for everything he had done so far.

Harry spent a few minutes thinking carefully about how to phrase this. Then he said, "I—reckon you're right about at least one thing. Trying to act like everything is normal and I can go on as I have been doesn't work. I was on the verge of a breakdown just now, and I wasn't even sure _why._"

Malfoy snorted. "_Finally_," he said, the word seeming to burst out of him as if he'd been repressing it as much as Harry had been trying to repress his emotions. When Harry frowned at him, he grimaced and shook his head. "Forgive me," he murmured, lifting a hand so that he could stroke Harry's hair. Harry let his eyes fall shut and struggled to keep from moaning. Just having someone touch him gently like that was one of his minor desires. "But yes, it's not going to work, Harry. The only question is who you'd prefer to have help you. There are Mind-Healers in St. Mungo's that you've worked with before, I know. Would you like one of them? Shacklebolt may have alerted them already."

"No," Harry said. "I can't talk about this with a stranger." He grabbed the flimsy sort of courage that was the only kind he had left these days and looked Malfoy in the face. "I'd like to talk about this with you."

Malfoy blinked several times, then shut his eyes and bowed his head. His hands moved to Harry's shoulders and tightened there. "Don't say this if you don't mean it, Harry," he whispered. "I've longed to hear you say that, but I would rather you do what's best for you. Don't dangle hope in front of me and then yank it away."

"Is that what you feel like I did?" Harry whispered.

Malfoy shook his head. "Not consciously. I know that you couldn't help it, that you were suffering. But I've wanted to help you, to heal you, to care for you and have you care for me for so long, and I thought I would get the chance when you came to Corybantes to investigate Keatson's death." He stiffened for a moment, probably because he thought Harry would pull away from him when he mentioned the case, but Harry stayed still and Malfoy let out a shaky breath. "I want to know if this is the real thing or not."

"It's the real thing," Harry said, as solemnly and as truthfully as he could.

Malfoy leaned forwards, slowly enough that Harry had plenty of time to withdraw if he wanted, and pressed his lips against Harry's jawbone. He withdrew a moment later and said, "You don't know what this means to me, but I'll try to show you." Already his eyes were brighter and his movements more confident. Harry smiled back at him. This was one of the best cures he could have, he thought. Helping Malfoy meant he didn't feel entirely useless and as if he was a parasite sucking the life out of other people. "Now. I need to speak to you honestly if you can, Harry." His voice dropped into sweetness on the last word, making Harry shiver. "What is it that makes you so frightened of losing control? I thought at first that perhaps your magic had gone wild and killed someone else, but I know that your first partner didn't die from that."

"My first partner died because I made stupid mistakes," Harry said thickly. He closed his eyes against the flood of memories, and felt his mind shake and quiver again. This was going to be hard, not easy, he reminded himself, against the temptation to keep both eyes and mouth shut and not say anymore. "I—I've suffered through cases where I lost control."

"What happened?" Malfoy's voice was pitched as if he wanted to hypnotize Harry, and he started stroking the back of his neck.

"I was tortured," Harry said. Malfoy's hand faltered once, then resumed the stroking in a pattern that made Harry's muscles relax. "And once I was undercover working with a cult, and I nearly became one of them. And I know Occlumency because of a case where a Dark wizard invaded my mind with Legilimency. I thought I _had _to be controlled, because otherwise I couldn't keep my job. And then I started to feel that losing control was unnatural and wrong."

"There's nothing unnatural about losing control under torture," Malfoy declared. Now his voice was rough.

"I know that." Harry opened his eyes against the temptation to keep them closed. "But I didn't _feel _that. It's like the difference between knowing and feeling you were right. I have to have both of them in conjunction, or I can't act."

Malfoy fell silent, though his hand never ceased moving. Then he said, "Do you think it's too early for me to try to fulfill one of your fantasies, Harry? A small one," he added hastily, when Harry opened his mouth to protest. "Just a small one, so you can pull back easily if you feel like you're losing control."

"If we do that," Harry said, feeling compelled to warn him, "it might open the floodgates. I don't know if I could rest content with you fulfilling just one. I might demand more from you."

Malfoy gave him a bright smile. "But that's just what I want, Harry."

Harry felt his will tremble again, but this time with a different purpose. He had fought so long against surrendering, seizing tools from his principles and his magic and his circumstances as an Auror.

But if his surrender was going to happen, it should happen in front of someone he partially trusted and could at least escape than in front of a powerful, enraged Dark wizard.

And—darkest of dark secrets, churning out of him like a monster out of a dark cave—

He _wanted _to surrender. He was so _tired._

"All right," he whispered. "All right."

Malfoy lifted his hands to Harry's cheeks and stroked them, his fingers widespread to touch many small places on Harry's skin at once, for an answer.


	11. Pleasures and Perceptions

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Just a note: I will be going out of town on vacation until next Monday and may or may not have Internet access during that time. This chapter ends with a cliffhanger. On the advice of some readers, I have decided to post it, but you might want to wait to read it because the next update could be slow in coming.**

_Chapter Eleven—Pleasures and Perceptions_

Harry swallowed. It was the thirteenth time he'd done that in the past two minutes.

He was lying face-down on a table that Malfoy had Transfigured into a comfortable bed without a headboard or footboard, and he wore nothing except a pair of pants. He had wanted to go further, to be completely naked, but his fingers had started trembling when he tried to pull the pants off, and Malfoy had shaken his head and whispered that it was fine, that he understood and that Harry was willing to try and fulfill this fantasy was enough.

Harry shut his eyes. A blush crowded his face, the heat in his cheeks reminding him it was there whenever he tried to forget.

Not that he _could_ forget, when Malfoy was in the other room preparing to fulfill his fantasy.

_Such a stupid fantasy. _Harry shifted and nearly got off the table, but sheer stubbornness in the end, and the fact that he had confessed his desires to Malfoy and Malfoy hadn't laughed, kept him there. _Nothing exotic about it. I don't want to have sex with animals or turn other people into my servants. I want a massage, someone I trust to touch me and make me feel good in a simple way. I want the feeling that I can utterly relax with someone else, and not have that person judge me as weak for my loss of control._

It was a stupid thing to be so nervous about. That was the reason he had expected Malfoy to laugh. He must have heard much sexier things, things that he would have preferred to do with Harry.

But Malfoy had nodded and smiled faintly, the kind of expression that said many things about Harry made sense now, and kissed his forehead. "Then I'll go into the other room and consider what kind of oil I should use," he said. "Unless oil isn't part of your fantasies?"

Harry had scanned his face anxiously. He knew that Malfoy wasn't the perfect statue he pretended to be, because he clenched his hands together with impatience now and then in his desire to get on with things. But Harry was more interested in whether he was biting his cheek, which would indicate that he was trying to hold back laughter.

There was nothing like that. If anything, the little movements Malfoy made that broke through his façade seemed to say that he was having trouble holding himself _back_, rather than holding himself back from walking away.

"Oil will work fine," Harry had whispered. His fantasy hadn't got further than the thought of warm hands rubbing over his skin and the fact that those warm hands would belong to someone he trusted not to make fun of him.

Now, he shifted and pressed his face into the Transfigured mattress as he stifled a groan. The mere thought was _arousing _him. How childish was it that the thought of being with someone he trusted could arouse him?

"Are you all right, Harry?"

Harry gasped and gripped the sides of the bed, or massage table, or whatever it was, tightly. His thoughts were sliding and blending again the way they had when he was in the throes of a breakdown. "I'll be all right," he muttered. "But I think I'm going to die of embarrassment before we finish here."

"Are you?" Malfoy had moved nearer, Harry knew that from the sound of his footsteps, but his voice still sounded too near and shockingly intimate. There was no laughter in that voice, no matter how hard Harry listened for it. "I hope that you don't. I hope I can show you that there's nothing to be embarrassed about, just as there's nothing to fear, in this room."

"But it's so _small_," Harry said, burying his face completely so that he wouldn't be tempted to turn his head around and try to speak to Malfoy. "I don't—it was so small a thing to want, and it was so small that I shouldn't have been afraid of it. Why would you want to help someone who's as cowardly as I am?"

Malfoy's hands shocked him into silence, or God knew how long his nervous babbling would have continued. Harry's mouth dropped open when he felt how _warm _they were. Maybe they were warmer than normal because of the sparkling oil that coated the palms and fingers, but he didn't care. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, shaking.

Malfoy was rubbing his shoulders in broad, firm strokes, traveling towards the middle of his back. His thumbs touched in the middle and dug deep, making Harry arch in pain as they found a knot of tension there. Malfoy probed at it until the tension faded and Harry found himself flopping forwards onto the massage table.

He might have tried to hang onto his control and present a stern face, but nothing could have stilled the shudders traveling through his body or the way his toes and his fingers flexed and curled. Malfoy wasn't going to be fooled about his reaction.

"Ah, good," Malfoy whispered. He was standing back from Harry at least a little—he had to be, to have his hands at that certain angle, Harry thought—but his voice still sounded as warm and close as though he were whispering in Harry's ear. "I wondered what you would look like when you finally let go and allowed yourself to _feel._ I dare say that I knew you would look magnificent, but it's always nice to see one's visions come true."

Harry shook his head. When he looked at the walls in front of him, even though they were the familiar walls of his sitting room, they sparkled and shifted through a red and blue haze. He tried to say something, but his breath escaped in long sighs instead of the words he wanted to use.

Then he had to lower his head again as Malfoy's hands traveled down to the middle of his back and concentrated there, and words were useless.

Tension he hadn't known he still carried, tension that seemed four or five years old, was flooding out of him. His mind roamed around the way it did before he went to sleep, touching on thoughts of work and torture and Auror training and the fact of his quiet but constant disagreements with Ron and Hermione, but nothing distressed him. The thoughts sparked once, as if they were going to light on fire, and then tumbled down and vanished in a shower of falling embers. When his eyes slid shut, Harry hardly noticed at first, because his mind was so busy becoming a more serene place.

"Oh," Malfoy said, his voice deep and guttural. "_Yes._" He turned to the side so that he could reach Harry's flank, and the whole skin of his bare arm swept down the middle of Harry's spine.

Harry grunted and twitched his head restlessly back and forth. The mere touch of naked skin was like the touch of fire. And it didn't help that the skin Malfoy was touching now, along his ribs, was probably the most sensitive skin on his body.

"Laugh, if you need to and I'm tickling you." Malfoy's voice had deepened again, and Harry would have teased him about sounding so animal if he had any breath left. "I don't mind. I'm not going to take it as a comment on my massage skills."

Harry found the strength to power words again from somewhere at the bottom of his being. "Not—wanting to laugh," he said. His neck had relaxed to the point where he found it hard to lift his head, so he didn't, but turned it to the side so that his lips could move free of the pillow and Malfoy had a better chance of understanding him. "Wanting to _moan_."

"What's stopping you, then?" Malfoy's voice was a breathless challenge. He dug in with his fingers on the right and swept his fingers down in a light, strumming motion along Harry's ribs on the left.

The soft, hoarse sound that Harry made in response seemed to tear open his mouth and work his lungs on its own. Harry was floating again, relinquishing control over his body the way he had when he was mumbling nonsense to Malfoy last night, but this time, he didn't mind, because he knew there was someone who would take care of him and make sure that his lack of control didn't force him to fall apart.

Someone to take care of him.

Malfoy repeated the stroking motion, this time on both of Harry's sides, and Harry sighed and all but sang in response. More than one fantasy was coming true right now, though he didn't know if Malfoy knew that. The knowledge sank into his head and fused with the pleasure of the massage and being able to trust Malfoy. That pleasure turned slowly through him, like some pinwheel spinning alone in the middle of space, and then exploded and extended all down his limbs.

Harry shifted in restless, growing desire. His cock was hard enough that the mere cradling touch of the cloth against it felt intolerable. His hips flexed, and he didn't know if he thrust or not. His body was heavy and languorous, as well as ready and eager. He was alert but deeply relaxed in the way that he sometimes felt when he woke up early but didn't want to get out of bed.

He had never known he could feel like this.

And it was _Malfoy _who made him feel it.

Wonder complemented the pleasure. Harry found himself wanting to turn over to look at Malfoy, so that Malfoy could at least see his expression. Merlin knew that Harry could never find all the words that would embody his feelings.

But rolling over would disrupt the massage, and now Malfoy had moved his hands down, his fingertips lightly stroking Harry's arse. Harry's breath caught in his throat. He spread his legs, and then waited.

"Harry?" Malfoy whispered. "Is it all right if I touch you here?" One finger touched down, finally, caressing a line up the cloth of his pants that was almost, but not quite, identical to the line up to his hole.

"Yes," Harry said, and wondered for a moment if he had sounded too eager, but when Malfoy stroked him again, the question faded, and he was left with nothing but need. "Yes, _please._"

He thought he could hear a subdued smile in Malfoy's voice when he spoke again, saying, "All right, thank you," but there was still no laughter, and then his fingers were working into Harry's buttocks, spreading them apart, dipping between them, bending the cloth. Harry dropped his head forwards on his arms and groaned blissfully.

And then time seemed to melt or fly away, and there was nothing in the _world _but Malfoy's fingers and the way his hands made Harry feel. He sank further into the haze than he had when Malfoy was simply massaging his back, his breaths deepening until he sounded as if he was hypnotized, his head lolling to the side. His eyes alternately opened and fluttered shut. He seemed to have no strength to keep them in one particular position.

"Malfoy," he whispered, and rolled the name around on his tongue, adding a length to the last vowel and then to the first one.

"My other name," Malfoy whispered at last, when so much time had passed that Harry thought his hands must surely be getting tired, except that they never faltered and never stopped stroking. "Say it."

Harry smiled. Malfoy was doing so much to make him feel good, and it seemed to him that he would like to do this small thing to make Malfoy feel good in return.

Besides, it had vowels the way Malfoy's other name did, so that he could stretch it.

"Draco," he said. This time, his eyes happened to be open, and he managed to turn his head so that his cheek was resting on his piled arms and he could look directly at Malfoy's face. "Draaaco."

Malfoy's face was violently flushed. His lips were parted, his eyes so dark that Harry thought the pupil had taken them over entirely. His cool mask was shattered, and Harry felt a flash of pride that he had managed to affect Malfoy as much as Malfoy had managed to affect him.

Of course, Malfoy had looked at him like this before. But there had been hints of madness to his gaze and expression then, and Harry didn't think they were there this time. He just looked very lustful and very—

Harry pulled himself back from the direction that his thoughts would have taken, because there were still some things that he didn't think he could say, even to himself. He lowered his eyes to the mattress, and Malfoy's fingers promptly stiffened and dug harder into his arse. Harry gasped and found himself lifting it towards those fingers. He hadn't even known that he liked the sensation of someone touching him like that. It felt so good that he thought it was a terrible thing he had gone this long not knowing that about himself.

"Look at me again." Malfoy's voice had always been perfectly pitched, but now it wavered and trembled and had a sound of uncertain heat that Harry recognized from those first moments when he was giving in to his fantasy and had thought Malfoy might laugh at him. "Please."

Harry twisted his head, the pleasure seeming to give extra strength to his muscles this time instead of take it away, and met Malfoy's eyes.

Malfoy stared back at him, blinking only rarely and reluctantly. Then he took his hands away from Harry's arse—Harry shifted in protest—and bent down, putting them on his shoulders. Harry let himself be rolled over before he thought about it.

Then he thought about what else Malfoy was likely to see, and blushed and tried to bring his hands together over his swollen groin.

Malfoy caught his wrists, with a delicacy that made Harry lose his breath all over again. He ducked his head under their joined hands, his eyes searching Harry's face. When he breathed out, the air seemed to touch every part of Harry's bare chest, which he knew wasn't physically possible and must be an exaggeration of his imagination, but it was the way he _felt._

"Let me see," Malfoy whispered. "Be undisguised in front of me. That's been a fantasy of mine as long as I've thought about you. Please?"

Harry shuddered. Even though the flush in his cheeks urged him to cover up and keep Malfoy from seeing him—if he _could _do that when Malfoy had already seen so much—the thick voice of the pleasure in his head kept pointing out that someone he trusted and who cared for him would be able to see every part of him.

And so far, Malfoy hadn't laughed.

He nodded and then lay back, spreading his legs the way he had when he was lying on his front. His cheeks were so red that he thought he was going to scorch himself if he tried to cover up the blush, so he dropped his hands to his sides the moment Malfoy released them and kept them resolutely there.

_Now I only have to survive the next few minutes._

Malfoy stared at him, his cheeks flushing even more. Harry didn't look down. He had a good idea about what Malfoy would see, and it wasn't _that _impressive—certainly nothing worth looking at with that eager gaze.

Then Malfoy reached down and stroked a thin line up the middle of Harry's cock, the same way he had touched his arse.

Harry cried out softly, so shocked by the sensations flooding through him that he couldn't move. He hadn't given Malfoy permission to do that. Still, as Malfoy closed his fingers around Harry's cock, it didn't seem to matter. Malfoy was being pushed faster and farther than he'd probably planned to go by his own desire, and that was flattering as fuck.

Besides, if Harry didn't get to be in control of himself anymore, than he didn't see why _Malfoy _should get to be in control of himself, either.

Malfoy simply stared, now and then licking his lips. Then he said, his words so fast that it took Harry a minute to understand what he was saying, "Harry, can I touch you? Let me bring you off. _Please._"

"You're already touching me," Harry said through dry lips, but Malfoy didn't appear to have heard him, and Harry was glad. He didn't want Malfoy to back off, he didn't want to ruin his confidence, but it seemed that part of Harry was determined to sabotage his pleasure at the same time he experienced it.

"Yes," he said.

Malfoy gave his own cry of pleasure and relief, and started to stroke. Harry closed his eyes, because with the drag of fabric over his erection, he could do nothing else.

He wondered, through the haze descending on him again, if he should have asked Malfoy to take the pants off, but then he decided that he liked this better. The way the cloth shifted and rested Malfoy's stroking fingers was like the way the tension in Harry's muscles had resisted the massage. Harry squirmed and spread his legs and dug into the mattress with his shoulders and reached down to circle his fingers around Malfoy's wrist so that he could feel the rhythm of the stroking better, and the movements were all instinctive, not done because he thought he had to or because he was wondering if they would make Malfoy like him better.

He'd never felt like this with a lover. Never. He'd never had the feeling that they stopped seeing him as a hero or a savior. He'd never had the feeling of just being in one body and responding to someone in another.

He cried out even though his orgasm hadn't arrived yet, his body so limp and loose he wasn't sure if he _could _come. There was only one source of delicious tightening in him, and it was in his groin. But that wasn't much, just enough to keep his attention focused and sweetly alert, like the light way that Malfoy had touched his arse at first.

"So _beautiful_," Malfoy whispered. "I have so many fantasies, but so many of them come down to you, being open like this. Giving me what I want, what no other person has ever seen."

Harry pried his eyes open and stared up at Malfoy. Or maybe he should call this brilliant, wet-eyed, slack-mouthed creature _Draco._

He did feel a distant amusement that, even now, Draco's fantasies mingled sheer desire with the longing to possess something that other people didn't have—

Then the orgasm came and burned him to silence, taking his self-consciousness and fear with it.

Harry had long known that it was possible to pass out from pain. He hadn't experienced the blankness that gripped him the moment his pleasure finished, so that it was like the falling of white sparks off a darkened cliff.

*

His waking was much more comfortable than the last one. This time, he woke up in the warm arms that had held him the last time he drifted off to sleep, and his body felt as rested and relaxed as it had when Draco was massaging him. Harry turned his head and buried his nose in the blond hair.

Draco was talking, and his voice was soft and low, and Harry thought he could have listened to it forever, for the sound and the content. It was strange, and exhilarating, that in this moment, Draco had become a person he _wanted _to listen to. Maybe that would change in a short time, but for right now, there was this.

"…wanted so much to do things for other people. It's strange, how much after the war I found out that I wanted to have power over others by _offering _them things. Gifts, space, privacy, the fulfillment of their fetishes.

"I would be happier if I knew where it came from, because of course my father taught me that a Malfoy always had to know himself and bad things would happen if he didn't." Draco snorted. The sound moved Harry's hair around. "If my father had followed his own advice, he would know that he didn't really want to serve the Dark Lord. But anyway.

"But it's there. I gain power, but I also gain pleasure, and I _give _power and pleasure. The exchange is unbalanced, and it's equal, and there are horrible aspects to what I do and wonderful aspects. The problem is that I think most of the people who come to Corybantes only see the one and ignore the other." Draco turned towards him; Harry could tell from the way his nose was now nudging Harry's cheek. "I thought that was the problem with you at first. That you sensed my desire to be in power as well as give people what they want, and were disgusted by it."

"I wasn't thinking that clearly then," Harry said, from a lulled, warm place where he could speak the truth. "I was disgusted by my own desire to surrender and indulge."

"I know that now." Draco stroked his hair again. His hand was trembling, and his words had become slurred and fast, as they had when he first touched Harry. "I would do _anything _for my clients. I try so hard to find the spells that will give them what they want, even if I don't know what those spells are when they first come to me or if they've done research and failed to find what they were looking for. I want to give them a safe place, and a place to act out their desires, and a place that is the living embodiment of their dreams. Take all that, and multiply it sixty times, and that's what I feel for you, Harry. Don't ever worry about me being selfless, please. To give you what you want _is _what I want."

"I know," Harry whispered, closing his eyes. "I know that now." He'd heard Draco say the same sort of thing before, but he hadn't paid much attention. Now he knew. Draco couldn't have held himself back so long before stroking Harry if part of him hadn't also found the massage satisfying.

There was a quiet, warm time when he drifted in motionlessness, and then he half-woke and heard Draco breathing and knew he'd gone to sleep.

And then he felt two thoughts arc across his mind like falling stars and meet in a burst of splendor that birthed a new star entirely.

_I would do anything for my clients. _Draco's voice.

_Everything here is his. Under his control, produced from his mind, executed—or not—at his command._ Leon's voice.

And the new thought:

_Keatson wanted to taste the sharp edge of death. That's not safe. It's not something that the fantasy rooms of Corybantes could truly give him as long as they only gave him illusions and left him alive afterwards. It's not something that his family would have let him do if they knew about it._

_Draco would do anything for his clients, and everything in the club is under his control._

_The fantasies normally never hurt anyone. No one can get past the wards on the rooms. No one can bring a weapon into them._

_Unless Draco wants them to. _

_And Draco wants what his clients want._

Under the starlight in his mind, Harry shivered.

And then, because he had to, he put a hand on Draco's shoulder and shook him awake.


	12. Epiphanies and Persuasions

Thank you again for all the reviews!

This is the last part of _Corybantes. _I hope you enjoyed it.

_Chapter Twelve—Epiphanies and Persuasions_

Draco opened his eyes slowly, as though his eyelids weighed far more than Harry knew they did. Harry clenched his hands tightly on the blanket and tried to look as calm as he could. His heart was beating in his ears rather than his chest, it felt like, and his muscles had a tension in them that not even a second massage could have soothed away, but he thought he had succeeded fairly well—

Until Draco looked up and met, and held, his gaze.

The tension between them pulled harder and tighter, instead of smoldering. Harry thought he could feel chains connecting them. Any moment now, Draco would try to buck and fight against those chains, and then Harry would have to lunge for his wand and immobilize him, and then this little interlude would be at an end.

_And you will never know what you could have had with him._

Harry dismissed the sadness he felt at that ruthlessly. He wouldn't let a criminal escape simply because that criminal had been good to him. He had to be an Auror, because it was only too obvious now that his attempt to be something else had been based on false promises.

And then Draco sighed, and dipped his head shakily, and reached out a hand to place it on Harry's shoulder. "Oh, thank God," he whispered. "You know. I was wondering how I would confess that."

Harry froze again. He had no idea what he was feeling at this moment, or what he was supposed to feel. He was empty and hollow and he simply looked at Draco's hand on his shoulder and then back into his face and waited for the explanation.

"Of course you don't understand," Draco said. His face and his voice were soft, if feverish, and he drew Harry to him and rolled them half-over on the pillow so that Harry's neck and head were comfortably supported, partially by his arm and partially by a pillow. "Why should you? But relax, and I'll tell you."

Harry swallowed. "I don't—I can't condone a murder, Draco."

"I know that." Draco stooped over him, his eyelids fluttering and his color high. Harry rushed to remind himself that this was a _murderer_ he was looking at, at least potentially. He hated the fact that he couldn't repress his inclinations towards Draco the way he would have been able to, once. "Please. Just listen to me and you'll understand." Draco paused and smiled wryly. "It's a good thing that I have at least some practice in explaining this. I had to tell Shacklebolt about it before it happened."

"Shacklebolt." Harry's voice was hollow and dead, too.

"Oh." Draco sighed and gnawed his lip. Harry could see traces of annoyance around his eyes. It was perversely comforting. "Yes, I reckon that will be the most difficult thing for you to accept. Shacklebolt knew about Keatson, and everything that his fantasies entailed. When I realized that Keatson sought death and would do anything to achieve it, I spoke to Shacklebolt and described the danger."

Harry shut his eyes. "I don't understand," he said. "Why would one man with strange fantasies concern Kingsley that much?" He could at least guess why Draco had spoken to Kingsley at all, and so didn't have to ask that. This case had been a political one from the beginning, what with the Wizengamot members concerned that their favorite playground might be closing. It would make sense for Kingsley to have been in communication with Draco.

"Keatson almost never spent his money on anything except Corybantes and the most basic necessities of life," Draco said. "He was wealthy, wealthier than his will probably gave you any idea of. He was paranoid enough to conceal some of his Galleons under false names in multiple vaults, you know. And he easily turned petulant. If I refused him constantly—as I had to do if I wanted to keep him alive—then he was capable of turning his sullenness on the world, and hiring people who would create quite a bit of trouble."

Harry didn't need that further described. He had seen what horror could come out of Dark Arts practiced with the pettiest intentions, and there were a group of Dark wizards who hired out as mercenaries to fulfill commissions for wizards who didn't know evil magic themselves.

Harry shuddered and swallowed. "So what did you tell Kingsley? Or what did he give you permission to do?"

Draco kissed his scar. "I knew you weren't stupid," he said, sounding thankful. "Shacklebolt granted me permission to fulfill Keatson's fantasy, as the best solution to the problem. Of course there would still have to be an investigation, but it was far less damaging than what might have happened."

"How did it happen?" Harry demanded, opening his eyes. It was hard, but he had to hold Draco's gaze and see someone there, the real, flawed human being who had allowed Keatson to die, rather than an evil genius or his lover of the past hour. "You owe me the truth about that."

"I still don't exactly know," Draco said. Far too calmly, Harry thought, narrowing his eyes. "My desire either coincided with his, which made the fantasies in the room act to kill him, or, _because _my desire coincided with his, his magic overpowered the wards on the room and made the fantasies answer to him instead. Either way, it was magic that killed him, in exactly the way he wanted to die. I promise you."

Harry rubbed his hand against his forehead. Draco caught his hand and kissed that, too, as if he wanted to kiss everything that touched Harry's scar.

"I don't—I don't understand what the point of this was," Harry said at last, haltingly. "Yes, yes, I know that you had to handle Keatson somehow. But why not tell me about it from the beginning? Kingsley chose me because he relied on my discretion. He could have trusted that I would keep the real reason behind the investigation a secret."

Draco cocked his head and gave him a small smile. "Did you think I lightly killed one of my clients?" he asked. "Did you think that I lightly agreed to accept the responsibility of making my club a murder scene, when Shacklebolt held that knowledge over me and could blackmail me if he wanted to? No. I demanded a price from him."

"Well, what, then?" Harry asked, his exasperation stirring out of the deep frost that had seemed to grip his emotions until now. "Because having an unwitting Auror wander around Corybantes strikes me as an odd one."

"You," Draco said.

Harry pushed himself to the opposite side of the bed. Draco raised his head, the expression on his face vanishing behind a calm, cold mask. Harry wrapped his arms around himself and flushed when he remembered that he was still only wearing pants.

"I…" Harry said, and bit down savagely on the broken remnants of his trust. "How _could _you? I thought—"

"Everything I said to you about desiring you, and wanting to help you relax and accept your fantasies, is still true." Draco's voice had deepened, and his eyes held that same unnerving look of longing that they had when he confronted Harry after his Polyjuice disguise melted away. "This hasn't changed any of that. But Shacklebolt and I couldn't tell you the truth behind Keatson's death, either, for two reasons. First, I don't think that you would have accepted it, no matter how discreet you tell me you are, without knowing something about Keatson's fantasies and the way that Corybantes normally works. It was best to let you discover that on your own."

"And the second reason?" Harry once again had no idea what to feel, whether he should open his arms to Draco or scrub at his skin to rid himself of Draco's taint. And he hated that he was considering the first option.

"You would never have agreed if we told you," Draco said quietly. "Shacklebolt thinks you should relax as much as I do, though I care about you as a person solely and he doesn't want to lose one of his best Aurors _or _his friend. Putting you into an environment like this was our best chance to show you that your control was faltering."

Harry ran his fingers over his scar again. He wished he knew what to _do_. He hadn't anticipated a confession like this when he thought that he could trust Draco. He wanted to get out of the bed and accuse Draco of betraying him.

But then he would have to go to Kingsley and accuse him of betraying him, too.

And after what he had seen in Draco's Pensieve letter…after the way Draco had touched him during the massage…after the look in Kingsley's eyes as he told Harry to take a holiday, which Harry understood better now…Harry didn't think he could.

"I don't like this," he told the blankets, because something in the room that was not Draco had to understand his helplessness.

Draco put a hand beneath his chin and forced his face up. Harry glared at him, but evidently the glare wasn't enough to deter Draco from leaning forwards and fastening his lips gently to Harry's. He didn't try to introduce his tongue, which Harry was grateful for. He didn't think he was ready for that right now.

When Draco drew back, he said, "I knew that you might react this way, which is part of the reason I'm glad you thought of it for yourself. I'll leave if you want me to." His jaw tightened, and so did his clasp on Harry's chin, which showed how clearly _he _didn't want to. "I'll let you have the time and the space to think about it. Just as long as you promise that you're not going to cut me off altogether."

Harry swallowed. He should probably push Draco out of his bed and roll over and show him his back. He should talk about how his trust had been broken, if not betrayed. He should do all these things that he thought were good and right and noble and self-denying and self-protective.

That he would have thought were good and right and noble and self-denying and self-protective a few hours ago, anyway.

But every fleeting touch of Draco's hands woke the memory of how they had felt on his back and on his sides, and on his cock. Harry flinched under his internal scathing condemnation of his weakness, but he couldn't pull away.

_I'm weak. I'm stupid. I'm thinking too much about myself._

The fact remained, though, that he had reached the end of his rope, and if Draco went away, then Harry knew he would fall apart again. He shuddered at the thought of going through that by himself, and what he might decide was a good idea if he managed to survive it.

"What have you done to me?" He whispered the question, not sure if it was an accusation or not, leaning forwards to study the way Draco's eyes darted about. "I can't—I can't just roll over and let you do whatever you want, but I can't send you away, either. Did you cast a mind control spell that weakened me somehow?"

"No," Draco said. His voice was deep and smug, but that still gave Harry no warning of what he would say before he said it. "There are these things called hormones, you see."

Harry stared into his face. He was probably being foolish, but he thought he could tell if Draco was lying to him—at least now, when Draco was so open and vulnerable and not at all the mysteriously-acting club owner who had confronted Harry during the first part of the case.

_Mysteriously-acting? I wonder if his actions were only strange to me in the same way that my actions were strange to him; we would have understood each other perfectly if we simply understood each other's mindset._

"I still don't understand," Harry said. He kept his voice low. He didn't know what would happen if he spoke about these things at a normal volume, but he didn't think he wanted to find out. "Can two days change me so much? I would have been marching you into Kingsley's office and ordering you confined to Azkaban only yesterday."

"This change has been coming for a long time," Draco replied. "I kept enough of an eye on you to realize that you were slowly crumbling under the constant pressure of tackling the worst cases by yourself. That was another reason Keatson's obsession worked out perfectly for me. I wouldn't have wanted you to fall apart alone." He said the words lightly enough, but his hands clamped down on Harry's arms hard enough that he knew there would be bruises in the morning.

"And what's your theory about the fact that I'm not taking you to Azkaban right now?" Harry asked. "At least if you're right and you didn't cast any mind-altering spells on me."

Draco's smile faded and he studied Harry so hard for long moments that Harry squirmed, his face flaming. When Draco spoke again, he was doing it from some deep place within himself that made Harry think this might be harder for him to talk about than his fantasies.

"I wanted to gratify Keatson's desires. I told you that. But _you _are the one who's been the center of my fantasy life for years, appearing in my dreams, with your own private courts of thought inside my mind. This was never about the chance to get Keatson out of the way as much as it was the chance to soothe you and save you and see that you have everything you deserve."

Harry now very much wished that he'd never asked this question, but crawled underneath the bed and died of embarrassment instead. It felt as though every inch of his skin was taut and hot, and his mouth was burning. But he doubted that this could be harder to pass through than the decision to trust in Draco. He stayed still and waited, while Draco's voice wavered and descended. _At least he's not perfectly confident, either, _Harry thought. _At least there's that._

"I think—I hope—I want to believe that you've really changed," Draco said, "that you've fallen apart and realized that yes, I was right and you were dangerously close to losing control of yourself altogether. There's no going back from a realization like that, not if it's deep enough. I hope that you'll decide to move forwards with my help. I think you want that as much as I do, though I'm not sure you can admit it yet." He paused and pressed a hand to his own burning cheek. "_I _can barely admit it," he whispered, "admit how much I want it, how much I'll despair if it's not true."

Harry shuddered and shut his eyes.

He knew what was sensible, what had been sensible since he woke up: denounce Draco and take him in and demand that he stand trial as a murderer. Ultimately, it had been his magic that killed Keatson, whether that magic escaped from his control or not. Draco didn't seem to think there was a way to find that out. Harry thought there might be.

But that wasn't what he wanted to do, or, probably, what he could bring himself to do.

Blame it on the sex. Blame it on the orgasm. Blame it on the fact that Harry hated the way his mind felt when it was flying apart and would like to avoid that feeling again for as long as possible.

The fact remained that, just now, just for a space of time that he told himself was tiny but which kept lasting minutes longer than he meant it to, Harry was thinking of what he wanted rather than what he should do.

And even worse than that, a question was appearing in his mind with fierce, quiet insistence that grew worse and worse as he sat there with Draco holding him.

_Why not? Who would it hurt if I went after what I wanted for once?_

Harry swallowed and opened his eyes. Draco stared at him, then looked away, as if he thought that that would seem too much like he was trying to influence Harry. Harry urged him back with his hands on those flushed cheeks until they were facing each other again. If he had to look at Draco when he was feeling vulnerable and too open, then Draco would have to look at him in the same moment.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for telling me the truth. Thank you for desiring me the way you did. I think that's the only way I would ever have had the courage to face what my longings implied. If it was with someone who was less than totally devoted to me, then I would have never trusted them." He ran his fingers up and down the creases next to Draco's eye, trying to learn them. "But I can't live like this."

"I understand." Draco sounded as if he was drowning. "Then I'll leave, and you won't have to see me again." His gaze snapped up to Harry's face suddenly. "Just promise me that you'll continue living without the barriers, without repressing yourself—"

"I mean that I can't live with you simply denying yourself for me," Harry interrupted hastily, before Draco could punish himself any further for a mistake Harry had made. "I want you to have what you want. And yes, I _know _that fulfilling my fantasies fulfills yours." That was because Draco had opened his mouth, brow wrinkled. "But I don't even know if you got to come when you were touching me. I don't want to go from one extreme to the other, from being completely selfless to completely selfish. Please help me live a balanced life."

"I came from watching you," Draco said.

Harry caught his breath, but told himself not to be seduced by the pure passion that seemed to be flaring in Draco's eyes right now. This was important. He didn't know if Draco had heard him, but for the moment, he was acting like he hadn't. Well, Harry refused to let that moment pass.

"I want you as a lover," he said. "Who wouldn't, after the way you touched me?" Draco tensed and gave a tiny jerk of his head. Harry went on. "I want you around because I want to get to know you better. And that's my own desire, I think. I told you, I can't accept simply devotion and fulfillment. I'm _not _a customer of Corybantes. I'm—confused. I need your help to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing now."

Draco tilted his head forwards. His hair fell into his eyes, and Harry no longer found it as easy to tell what he was thinking, which was doubtless one of Draco's purposes. "You're not angry about what Shacklebolt and I did, then?" he asked lowly.

"I don't know yet," Harry said. "I should be, but I'm not that angry, and I think I'll need some time to get used to this." He paused, then added in a meditative tone, "It probably helps that I haven't liked Keatson since the first time I saw those drawings."

Draco laughed, then coughed. His hand shook as he ran it in a quick swipe, a swift caress, down the middle of Harry's chest. "This is what I've wanted," he said. "I feel like I'm being handed a dream."

"You aren't," Harry said, and this time he tried to make every word as sharp and hard as an iron arrowhead. Draco had to _pay attention._ "You don't know me, not in the way you think I do. You don't know whether I'll be hard to get along with or not when I finally start acting normal again. You don't know how much I'll keep of my prudishness and how often I'll disapprove of Corybantes. You don't know when I'll be ready for sex."

"But I can find out." Draco leaned nearer and nearer, the smile on his face dazzling. "Which would be hard if I was locked in Azkaban."

Harry caught his wrists. "And you don't mind that things are going to change and I won't be your perfect puppet forever?" he asked, his eyes searching Draco's face. "If nothing else, I know how you manipulated me into coming to Corybantes, and I'll be watching for other tricks like that."

Finally, Draco's smile faded and he looked appropriately serious. "I realize that," he said. "I can't say I'll never try to trick you again, either. That's—the way I am. When it seems like the best way to get something, I do it."

"Then keep in mind that next time I might not forgive you as easily," Harry said, releasing him. "This time, you and Kingsley happened to be right. But that won't always be the truth."

Draco rested his hand on Harry's chest, above his heart, and seemed to listen to the beat. Then he said, "You don't understand, Harry. I know that you feel required to give me all these dire warnings, like the responsible adult you are, but _I don't care. _I'm too giddy to. I finally have you, and that's enough."

Harry opened his mouth to object, but Draco caught his eye and whispered, "Can we ignore it for right now? Can I bask in finally having you? Please."

Harry didn't have the heart to deny him, since this was the first purely selfish request that Draco had made of him, and because he felt much the same way. He _shouldn't _be rejoicing in this. He should be mature and sober and consider all the consequences of everything.

Draco dipped his head and blinked hard.

Well, fuck. Harry would be mature in the morning.

He leaned forwards and kissed Draco. Draco kissed him back, and draped himself over Harry's body, closing his eyes. Harry wrapped his arms around him, wondering how well he would get to know the angles of his shoulders and ribs.

A sharp sound at the door caught his attention. Harry turned his head. If a Dark wizard had managed to sneak into his house through the wards, then he would—

Instead, Ron stood there, staring at them both. Harry stared back. Would Ron choose this moment to argue with Harry about vanishing?

Ron gave Harry a gigantic grin and a small bow, then turned and walked out of the room as if he had never meant to intrude.

Harry shuddered once and closed his eyes. This was _mad._ He half-expected to wake up in one of the fantasy rooms at Corybantes and find out that he had dreamed up everything.

Nothing ended like this—none of his cases, anyway. He wouldn't stop having nightmares. He would have to return to his job, and he would have to deal with the fact that Draco's job made him distinctly uncomfortable.

But at the same time, he knew neither he nor Draco had the heart to deny this, and couldn't do it any more than they could stop having fantasies.

_We'll just have to live with it, I reckon, _Harry thought, and fell asleep with a cautious mixture of happiness and confusion.

And perhaps a bit of the sense of coming out of the darkness, at last.

Or finding a haven within it.

**End.**


End file.
